David Giaretta, Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC), UK

Title: CASPAR: Early results and future goals.

Abstract:

This presentation will describe early results from CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval), a 42-month project funded in large part by the European Union, under the Information Society Technologies R&D program. CASPAR will address the growing challenge of the deluge of intrinsically fragile digital information - upon which we are increasingly dependent - by building a pioneering framework to support the end-to-end preservation lifecycle for scientific, artistic and cultural digital information, based on existing and emerging standards (see http://www.casparpreserves.eu).

In particular CASPAR will address the issue of how digitally encoded information can still be understood and used in the future when the software, systems and everyday knowledge will have changed. Things we take for granted now would otherwise be completely unfamiliar, something to be guessed at, even if we preserve the bits and bytes. In addition to benefiting future generations, immediate benefits result from doing the preservation right by supporting interoperability and use of unfamiliar current data.

CASPAR will be tested against a breadth of user communities and types of digital information, including: science, performing arts and cultural heritage, each of which has a huge variety of data (things meant to be processed) as well as documents of various types (things meant to be rendered, for example to be read or heard). To achieve results, CASPAR creates a consortium covering important digital holdings, with the appropriate scientific (CCLRC – the lead partner and ESA ), cultural (UNESCO) and creative expertise (INA, CNRS, University of Leeds, IRCAM and CIANT), together with commercial partners ( ACS , ASemantics, MetaWare, Engineering, and IBM Haifa Research Lab), experts in knowledge engineering (CNR and FORTH) and other leaders in the field of information preservation (HATII, University of Glasgow and ISTBAL, University of Urbino).

Bio:

Dr David Giaretta has had extensive experience in planning, developing and running scientific archives and providing and managing a variety of services to large numbers of users. He has made fundamental contributions to the OAIS Reference Model that forms the basis of much digital preservation work far beyond repositories of scientific data, and contributes still to developing the follow on standards. He is a member of the RLG/ NARA Digital repository Certification Task Force. He has published a number of scientific papers in refereed journals and given presentations at many international conferences, scientific as well as technical. In addition he has broad experience in e-Science. In 2003 he was awarded an MBE for services to Space Science. Having been involved from the start of the successful DCC consortium, Dr Giaretta is Associate Director for Development in the DCC and now also the Project Director of CASPAR.