Digital Curation as a Key Component
                       in Research Infrastructures:
                         From Data Preservation
               to Processes Preservation and Verification

                                         © Andreas Rauber
                    Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems
                                          Vienna, Austria
                                      rauber@ifs.tuwien.ac.at


With the advent of data-driven science, also             This tutorial will start with a brief review of
referred to as, for example, the Fourth                  the classical challenges in digital preservation.
Paradigm, Big Data, and other similar                    It will then move on to motivate the need for
concepts, the need to safeguard the                      process preservation as part of data curation.
investments made into collecting and                     This will be followed by a presentation of
preparing massive amounts of data (some of               approaches to facilitate process preservation,
which is unrecoverable) has drastically gained           most notably process context capture as well
importance. Providing digital preservation of            as recommendations on how to ease process
research data is thus emerging as a service that         preservation by proper design.
has to be provided by sophisticated research
infrastructure frameworks. Yet, with the                 We will also address legal arrangements to
complexity of research processes increasing,             counter loss of proprietary information
the needs for preservation stretch beyond                required for maintaining processes executable.
merely maintaining data accessible. Capturing            Last, but not least we will discuss a framework
and documenting the context of its creation              for evaluating processes to verify authentic
and use is an enormous task, requiring                   behavior upon re-execution, identifying
sophisticated     representation    information          information to be captured and processing
networks. Even more challenging, complex                 steps to be performed upon process design and
processes are an integral part of data                   preparation for preservation.
provenance. We thus also need to capture,
preserve, and maintain usable a series of data
processing routines and modules in order to be
able to establish the validity of scientific
analysis, to repeat earlier computations on new
data, in short to make full use of the
opportunities offered by data-intensive
science.




Proceedings of the 14th All-Russian Conference
"Digital Libraries:       Advanced Methods and
Technologies, Digital Collections" ＿ RCDL-2012,
Pereslavl-Zalesskii, Russia,   October 15-18 2012.




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