The valuable digital assets of many cultural and scientific institutions across Europe representing the cumulated knowledge of generations are becoming increasingly vulnerable and at risk of being no longer accessible, given the fast evolution of computer hardware and software.

The European Union, under the Information Society Technologies R&D programme, is co-funding (providing 8.8M Euro out of the total planned spend of 16 M EUR) a new project aiming at addressing this risk.

The large scale Integrated Project, CASPAR (Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval), 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).

Dr Kia Ng, a key member of CASPAR from the University of Leeds, Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music (ICSRiM, http://www.icsrim.org.uk), explained: “It is very exciting to collaborate with CASPAR to 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. I am particularly interested on the contemporary performing arts with 3D motion data and interactive multimedia technologies. Digital information and preservation for performing arts is complex and challenging as it involves a wide range of representations with multi-modal interactions, communications and contexts. 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”.

The project team aims to establish an authoritative foundation methodology for digital preservation activities, supported by a general system framework guaranteeing the requirements of longer term preservation of unrelated digital resources.

Of particular importance is the huge breadth of user communities and types of digital information against which CASPAR will be tested: 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 read). This great variety means that CASPAR will have to develop novel flexible techniques which have wide applicability.

The preservation infrastructure, including issues such as authentication, accreditation and digital rights management, must itself be preservable if it is to be fit for purpose, and specific testbeds will be produced, aimed to be embedded in operational systems within the CASPAR consortium, and which should be easy to integrate into many other operational systems.

To achieve this, CASPAR brings together a consortium covering important digital holdings, with the appropriate extensive scientific (CCLRC – the lead partner and ESA), cultural (UNESCO) and creative expertise (INA, CNRS, ICSRiM - 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).

1 http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/digicult/digitalpreservation.htm

Further more information, contact:
Kia Ng
Director
ICSRiM - University of Leeds, School of Computing & School of Music, UK
Email: kia@comp.leeds.ac.uk, kia@computer.org
Tel: 0113 343 2572 (+44-113-343-2572)
Web: http://www.kcng.org, www.icsrim.org.uk

David Giaretta, Project Co-ordinator, Email: d.l.giaretta@rl.ac.uk

Notes for Editors
CASPAR facts:
CASPAR web site: http://www.casparpreserves.eu
Project type: Integrated Project
Start date: 1 April 2006, but contract with EU has just been signed
Duration: 42 months
EU Funding: € 8 800 000
Total planned spend: € 16 000 000
Number of partners: 17
Project co-ordinator: Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, UK

OAIS Reference Model (ISO 14721)
Guiding principle will be the application of the Open Archival Information Systems Reference Model (OAIS, ISO 14721). The Open Archival Information Systems Reference Model is a very widely adopted international standard about the preservation of digitally encoded information. It is available from http://public.ccsds.org/publications/archive/650x0b1.pdf

Work will include the development of key components and framework providing characterisation, including Representation Information and Preservation Description Information, virtual storage, using advanced storage technologies, and access services, including intuitive query and browsing mechanisms, and, throughout all these, exploiting the potential of semantic web technologies.

The CASPAR Consortium
Council for the Central Laboratory for the Research Council (UK)
University of Leeds (UK)
The European Space Agency (Italy)
HATII, University of Glasgow (UK)
Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute
ISTBAL, University of Urbino (Italy)
UNESCO (HQ in France)
ACS Advanced Computer Systems SpA (Italy)
ASemantics (Italy)
IBM Haifa Research Laboratory (Israel)
Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (Italy)
MetaWare (Italy)
Metaware SpA
INA (France)
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA (Italy)
Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH-ICS) (Greece)
National Centre for Scientific Research (France)
IRCAM (France)
CIANT (Czech Republic)