iPres 2009: Schmidt on a framework for distributed preservation workflows

Schmidt is associated with the EU PLANETS project, building an integrated system for development & evaluation of preservation strategies. Environment based on service-oriented architecture, with platform, language and location independence.

Basic building blocks are preservation interfaces (verbs). Define atomic preservation activities; low level concepts & actions; light-weight & easy to implement. >50 tools wrapped up as the PLANETS service. Plus digital objects (the nouns): generic data abstraction for modelling digital entities. Minimal & generic model for data management, with no serialisation schema, so perhaps create from DC/RDF, serialise with METS etc.

Digital Object Managers map from source (eg OAI-PMH) to PLANETS Dos. There are PLANETS registry services. There is a workflow engine driven by templates. Developers create workflow fragments, experimenters select fragments and assemble, configure & execute them. Workflows implemented by workflow execution engine (WEE: a level 2 abstraction), which looks at access management etc. (?).

This ends up being, not an out of box solution, but an extensible network of services, but capable of public deployment to allow sharing of resources and results.

Question: are services discoverable by format? Use PRONOM as format registry, also building an ontology that defines which property can be preserved.

Question: Does PLANETS assume a particular preservation strategy? Have tools for emulation and migration.

Question: are tools deployed outside the project? Not yet but trying to figure out.