Welcome to the second edition of the CASPAR newsletter. Since our last newsletter, we have had many significant updates within the project. Many events have been attended, new communication materials have been released and we have also reached the final stage for the preparation of the last CASPAR software release. This newsletter will have a brief description of each area allowing you to see how the project has been progressing over the past few months, technical updates combined with some news on up and coming events and where CASPAR will be presented.

What’s happening with OAIS?

The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS[i]) is an ISO standard (ISO 14721) which was published in 2003 and is “now adopted as the ‘de facto’ standard for building digital archives[ii]”. ISO standards are reviewed periodically and this process started for OAIS about 2 years ago with a worldwide request for ideas and suggestions for clarifications and improvements; many were received. These have been analysed in depth; changes have been proposed, reviewed by the originators of the comments and a new version of OAIS has been produced. Besides minor corrections and clarifications, significant Improvements have been made about many topics including authenticity, significant properties, digital rights, risk management and emulation.

OAIS version for public examination

With regards to OAIS we would like to draw your attention to the following announcement regarding it’s recent review:

Many comments and ideas for clarifications and improvements for OAIS were received as part of its 5 year review process.

These suggestions were reviewed and the proposed dispositions sent to their originators for further comment. This draft version of OAIS contains these and many other improvements and is the candidate for submission to ISO for review. At this stage we are seeking primarily to identify errors rather than further ideas.

The PDF file is available at http://cwe.ccsds.org/moims/docs/MOIMS-DAI/Draft%20Documents/OAIS-candidate-V2-markup.pdf

Please send corrections to oais-support@oais.info by 15 June 2009

(NB there are some cross-reference errors which will be corrected in the final version)

Shortly after this date the corrected OAIS update will be sent to ISO and in due course this will be released for international review at which point further comments may be submitted.

John Garrett (chair) 
David Giaretta (deputy-chair)

Can you tell who you should trust with your data?

It is difficult these days to know whom to trust. This is true in the short and medium term but is even more risky for the long term. Of particular interest to a project, such as CASPAR, is the question of long term preservation of the digitally encoded information on which we increasingly rely and yet which is inherently fragile. For more than a decade there have been demands for some way to certify digital repositories. OAIS included this in its roadmap of follow on standards. As a result RLG and NARA organised a Task Force which produced the Trusted Repository Audit Checklist (TRAC). TRAC has been used as the basis of the new draft standard which will be submitted to ISO soon. Details are available from http://wiki.digitalrepositoryauditandcertification.org. It is hoped that an international accreditation and certification organisation was be created to issue ISO accreditation of repositories following this standard.

We are working closely with the standards group and we firmly believe that use of CASPAR components and toolkits will put repositories in a better position to be certified.

Science Data Infrastructure Roadmap

On the CASPAR site you will have seen our Workflow picture which shows some of the various interactions between our key components and key players (users, curators and producers).

Another diagram appeared on the site which deserves a little more explanation. We wanted to show how our components fit into the bigger picture. We believe that preserving digitally encoded information over the long term is a difficult job that needs more than a few desktop tools. We believe there is a need for a broader level of support – just as there is for network connectivity and compute and storage resources as provided by things like GEANT and the GRID.

We have been working with the PARSE.Insight project (http://www.parse-insig ht.eu) on a Roadmap for additional components to supplement the layers of capability provided by the network and the GRID – as illustrated by the various layers in the diagram above. Essentially at the lowest level there are isolated islands of capability, with, for example, cables, routers, etc; these are joined by interconnects and gateways. On top of each organisation is its storage and compute capabilities; components such as resource registries, schedulers and process controls allow these to interoperate. A third layer embodies the repositories; components such as cross-reference services allow these to work together.

As we move to the future we envisage the need for another set of components to assist us in faithfully communicating our current information (not just the bits!) to future users.

PARSE.Insight, in collaboration with CASPAR and others, has gathered a great deal of information and ideas from around the world and helped refine the picture of what is needed. The resulting Science Data Infrastructure Roadmap is available from
http://www.parse-insight.eu/downloads/Parseinsight_draft_roadmap_20090327.pdf - please take a look and provide us or the PARSE.Insight project with your thoughts.

What is pleasing from the CASPAR point of view is that many of the components we have developed fit very well into the Roadmap and we believe provides us with yet further reason for carrying on our work.

Storage Networking Industry Association and Long Term Retention

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has formed the Long Term Retention (LTR) technical working group (TWG) (https://www.snia.org/apps/org/workgroup/ltrtwg/) to generate reference storage architectures, interfaces and services, and author educational materials for storage aspects of long term retention and preservation. Initially, the TWG is working on a new logical container format, named Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF), for the storage of preservation objects. Researchers from CASPAR and IBM Haifa Research Lab, co-chair the technical working group.

SIRF is a logical container format for the storage subsystem appropriate for the long-term storage of digital information. It is a logical data format of a mountable unit, e.g. a filesystem, a block device, a stream device, an object store, a tape, etc. The SIRF logical container includes a cluster of “interpretable” preservation objects that can be understood in the future. SIRF is self-describing; namely it can be interpreted by different systems and in different points in time. SIRF is also self-contained; namely all data needed for the preservation objects and interpretation is contained within the preservation objects cluster. This facilitates contained information lost - if a mountable unit is damaged or lost – the information in the other mountable units still remains valid. SIRF leverages OAIS and CASPAR to create storage subsystems that are aware of their preservation objects and can be interpreted by different applications and vendors.

SIRF enables reducing the cost of preservation, as the preservation processes can be done in a lower level of the system stack and can be performed close to the data in more robust, efficient and automatic methods. This will reduce the need for export/import procedures of preservation objects and enable more scalable cost-effective physical and logical migrations.

CASPAR-GENESI-DR

Long Term Preservation of Earth Science data and of the capability to discovery, access, process and use them is essential for scientists needing broad series of data for several types of investigations (e.g. Global Change).

Recently a Working Group led by ESA has been created to establish a framework of collaboration between the CASPAR and GENESI-DR (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories) projects.

GENESI-DR (http://www.genesi-dr.eu/) has the challenge of establishing open and seamless access to data, information, products and knowledge originating from space, airborne and in-situ sensors from several dispersed Earth Science digital repositories.

From this cooperation it is expected that:

1) CASPAR will benefit from the GENESI-DR services to validate in a more complete form its data preservation framework in the Earth Science domain and

2) GENESI-DR Research Infrastructure will demonstrate its ability to adopt data preservation and curation mechanisms defined in CASPAR.

[i] http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf

[ii] Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery, http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf0728/nsf0728.pdf

Upcoming Events

African Digital Scholarship and Curation 2009

David Giaretta will be presenting during (Track B) throughout the three day event in in Pretoria, South Africa 12th-14th May 2009

The 3 days will include:

Identification of opportunities, strategies and practical examples for new forms of research and scholarship and for the management of the digital content of these activities by academics, researchers, scientists, information professionals and IT experts

For the conference programme please see the following link:
http://www.library.up.ac.za/digi/programme.htm

Workshop on Preservation Supported by the MEDIA Training Programme of the European Union.

An exceptional opportunity to meet with international leaders in the fields of preservation !

CIANT_International Centre for Art and New Technologies in collaboration with
FAMU presents:

Preservation techniques and methodologies for digital and audiovisual records

Prague, Czech Republic
May 20-23, 2009

Among the speakers from 7 countries:

• Richard Wright from BBC (UK)
• Dalit Naor from IBM (Israel)
• Richard Rinehard from the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (USA)
• Don Foresta, from MARCEL Research artist and theoretician in art (USA/France)
• Oliver Grau (DE), Danube University.

For more information please see the following link: http://transistor.ciant.cz/2009/

Recent Events

1st CASPAR/BELIEF II Brainstorming Workshop

On April 6th and 7th, the CASPAR consortium supported the organisation of the1st BELIEF II Brainstorming Workshop in Athens, Greece. The topic of the two day event was sustainable e-infrastructures: challenges in data provenance and authenticity. The workshop was composed of a mixture of presentations and discussions in regards to numerous aspects of provenance of scientific data: authentification, annotation, archiving, etc. One of its main goals was to address these issues by bringing together a multitude of guests from a variety of different disciplines. CASPAR consortium member Vassilis Christophides of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas and University of Crete (FORTH) in Athens, was among the diverse presenters at the workshop. He specifically touched upon provenance modeling in CASPAR and the authenticity model and implementation. Other projects at the event included D4Science and Preservation and Long-term access via Networked Services (PLaNetS). Further information and continued discussion from this event can be accessed via the following link: http://jemini.di.uoa.gr/wiki

DPE/Planets/CASPAR/nestor Joint Training Event: The Preservation challenge: basic concepts and practical applications

From March 23rd through March 27th, once again the CASPAR project collaborated within the Wepreserve bracket along with the projects, Digital Preservation Europe, Planets, and nestor to participate within the joint training event: The Preservation Challenge: basic concepts and practical applications.

The event took place over 4 day period with its main focus was to raise awareness and understanding of the key digital preservation issues and challenges and also to gain an understanding of the reference model for Open Archival Information System (OAIS).

At the event, CASPAR was represented by Carlo Meghini, from The Institute for Science and Technology in Informatics of the Italian National Research Council, Claudio Prandoni and Marlis Valentini from Metaware SpA. Moreover, Carlo’s presentations mainly focused on the OAIS reference model, Knowledge Service for Preservation and also on the conceputual model for Authenticity. Claudio presented on an infrastructure for preservation and Marlis presented a case study on intellectual property rights.

The event was a success seeing over 40 people in attendance, further details can be accessed via the following link: http://www.wepreserve.eu/events/barcelona-2009/

Communication Materials

CASPAR Training Videos

The CASPAR training videos are now due for release and we should see them on the CASPAR homepage soon. The videos focus on the CASPAR testbeds within the Cultural, Scientific and Artistic domains. Interviews with project co-ordinator, David Giaretta, and other partners allow the viewer to gain a better understanding of the issues facing each testbed and how working together within the CASPAR project can help combat the threats to each domain’s data.

The CASPAR e-booklet 3rd Edition Due to be released within the next couple of months is the 3rd and final version of our E-booklet. The latest version of the booklet will see updates on each area of the project and also more information about the final software release from the project. Once the booklet has been completed and released, you, as a community member, will be first to hear about it.

The CASPAR Digital Preservation Handbook
Addressing Digital Preservation with CASPAR

The CASPAR Digital Preservation Handbook will be available on the website very soon; this is a follow on from our Digital Preservation leaflet that we released late last year. However, the Handbook goes into more detail with regards to the technical aspects behind what CASPAR has been developing and allows you to see exactly how CASPAR intends to help combat the threats facing digital date.

Here is an excerpt from it and once it has become available, we shall inform you accordingly:

CASPAR Answers to Digital Preservation Issues

CASPAR ANSWERS CASPAR KEY COMPONENTS