CiTAR - Preserving Software-based Research

In contrast to books or published articles, pure digital output of research projects is more fragile and, thus, more difficult to preserve and more difficult to be made available and to be reused by a wider research community. Not only does a fast-growing format diversity in research data sets require additional software preservation but also today’s computer assisted research disciplines increasingly devote significant resources into creating new digital resources and software-based methods. In order to adapt FAIR data principles, especially to ensure re-usability of a wide variety of research outputs, novel ways for preservation of software and additional digital resources are required as well as their integration into existing research data management strategies. This article addresses preservation challenges and preservation options of containers and virtual machines to encapsulate software-based research methods as portable and preservable software-based research resources, provides a preservation plan as well as an implementation. &nbsp

CiTAR – Citing and Archiving Research

While the institutional introduction of infrastructure for the collection and conservation of primary scientific data is currently under construction or already exists, a parallel problem awareness arises for the associated models and methods, in particular for data evaluation. However, there is hardly any usable infrastructure and service offerings yet. Although the DFG recommendations on "good scientific practice" currently only recommend the retention of primary scientific data, the remainder of the recommendation refers to mandatory records of "materials and methods" that are not only necessary for comprehensible results but also for the publication process. If scientific results are to be reproducible, for example for an independent verification, a reconstruction of the experimental setup is necessary. However, in the digital age, with its extremely short life span (and availability) of hardware and software components, replicating a data processing process that is identical in all components can not be achieved solely on the basis of records. CiTAR (Citing and Archiving Research), a three-year Baden-Württemberg state project, develops infrastructure to support computer assisted research. One major outcome of this project are means to publish, cite and provide long-term access to virtual research environments. The aim of this project is to develop a cooperative, multidisciplinary technical-organizational service in order to support teaching and research in the further development of "good scientific practice". The service should provide data and scientific methods jointly citable and reproducibly in order to meet the requirements of modern journals. CiTAR realizes re-use of research data and long-term availability in terms of a modern research data management. To achieve the project objectives, three of the four bwFor HPC operators have joined forces to prototype a broader scope in the natural sciences, especially the computational and data-intensive scientific disciplines. The developed service provides automated import of virtual machines and popular container formats like Docker and Singularity. CiTAR assigns persistent identifiers to the imported research environments and provides ressources to re-run the archived objects with external data

Adding Emulation Functionality to Existing Digital Preservation Infrastructure

The emulation of obsolete hardware and software environments to enable information to be read, and to facilitate interaction in a way that simulates the original user experience, is a well- established part of digital preservation solutions. Excellent tools have been developed to work with emulators, but these have remained in the research domain rather than being able to be exploited at scale. This paper explores a real example of how an emulation framework has been added to existing digital preservation infrastructure. This integration has enabled information has been extracted from obsolete hardware, held in a digital preservation system at Yale University Library (YUL), and linked to an appropriate emulator (provided by the University of Freiburg’s Emulation as a Service framework). All of this enables YUL to recreate the user experience of interacting with content using the original software quickly and easily whenever a user requests it. This integration offers the prospect of large scale emulation as a service linked to real preserved data that is in need of this approach and this paper will examine the next steps needed to make this a reality

Demonstration of an Integrated System for Platform-independent Description of Human-Machine Interactions: Demonstration - iPRES 2014 - Melbourne

When using emulation to render digital objects, a dedicated system environment is required. This environment typically consists of a set of software, i.e. an emulator, replicating the original hardware, operating system, hardware drivers, application as well as tools and utilities. Typically such technical meta-data is modelled using a view-path. Configuration and operating knowledge, however, is also required and needs to be described and preserved to secure deterministic future environment and workflow replication. One possible solution is to capture and replay human-machine interaction in an abstract way. A model for recording and capturing interactions between human users and an emulated machine has already been proposed. With the integration of such a system in an Emulation-as-a-Service service model, usability has been improved significantly by integration the capturing and replay into EaaS workflows. This demo’s purpose is to demonstrate the system’s usability and utility for digital preservation tasks like automation, documentation and replication of interactive tasks

Exhibiting Digital Art via Emulation: Paper - iPRES 2016 - Swiss National Library, Bern

The availability and accessibility of digital artworks is closely tied to a technical platform, which becomes quickly unavailable due to a fast technical life-cycle. One approach to keep digital artworks performing is to replace physical hardware parts with emulation. Preparing an emulator to publicly display digital art is typically time-consuming and, more importantly, usually done on a case-by-case basis, making each installation a unique and costly e_ort. We present an adaptation of the Emulation as a Service framework to be deployed on a self-contained USB-stick, booting directly into a prepared emulated environment. Furthermore, we report from practical experiences using the system in two museum exhibitions

CiTAR – Citable Scientific Software and Software Methods

Moderne Forschungsvorhaben stützen sich nicht nur auf computergestützte Methoden und digitale Ressourcen, sondern entwickeln häufig auch spezifische Software und software-gestützte Prozesse. Ein wesentliche Säule der Wissenschaft ist die Nachvollziehbarkeit sowie gegebenenfalls die Reproduktion oder Verifikation veröffentlichter Erkenntnisse. Für computergestützte Forschung wird dies zunehmend zu einer Herausforderung, insbesondere durch die komplexe Rekonstruktion softwarebasierter Methoden, ihrer spezifischen Konfiguration und technischen Abhängigkeiten. Dieser Beitrag stellt CiTAR1 - Citing and Archiving Research vor, ein dreijähriges Projekt gefördert durch das Ministeriums für Wissenschaft und Kunst des Landes Baden-Württemberg, das eine Infrastruktur zur Unterstützung computergestützter Forschung entwickelt. Im Fokus stehen dabei die Methoden, d.h. softwaregestützte Prozesse oder Modelle zur Erstellung oder Auswertung von Daten. Das wesentliche Projektziel ist es, diese Methoden nachvollziehbar und nachnutzbar nachzuweisen, so dass diese ebenso zitierbar und publizierbar werden wie derzeit schon Forschungsdate

Characterization of CD-ROMs for Emulation-Based Access

Memory institutions have already collected a substantial amount of digital objects, predominantly CD-ROMs. Some of them are already inaccessible with current systems, most of them will be soon. Emulation offers a viable strategy for long-term access to these publications. However, these collections are huge and the objects are missing technical metadata to setup a suitable emulated environment. In this paper we propose a pragmatic approach to technical metadata which we use to implement a characterization tool to suggest a suitable emulated rendering environment

(Re-)publication of Preserved, Interactive Content – Theresa Duncan CD-ROMs: Visionary Videogames for Girls

This poster presents implementation details, reception and lessons learned from a Cloud-based emulation project for world-wide interactive access to preserved CD-ROMs