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R. Mayer, J. Binder, S. Strodl, A. Rauber:
"Automatic Discovery of Preservation Alternatives Supported by Community Maintained Knowledge Bases";
Talk: International Conference on Digital Preservation, Melbourne, Australia; 2014-10-06 - 2014-10-10; in: "Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Digital Preservation", (2014), ISBN: 978-0-642-27881-4; 65 - 74.

Automatic Discovery of Preservation Alternatives
Supported by Community Maintained Knowledge Bases
Rudolf Mayer, Johannes Binder,
Stephan Strodl
Secure Business Austria
Vienna, Austria
Andreas Rauber
Vienna University of Technology
& Secure Business Austria
Vienna, Austria
ABSTRACT
Preservation Planning, which deals with selecting the most
appropriate preservation action to be applied to digital ob-
jects, is an important step in any digital preservation activ-
ity. Comprehensive Preservation Planning depends on the
availability of identi ed alternatives of preservation actions,
which are for example le format migrations to migrate data
in an outdated format to one that has better support. Also
emulation, e.g. of the behaviour of a speci c software ap-
plication (application emulation), can be a viable preserva-
tion action. The alternative identi cation step can either be
performed manually by an expert, or (semi-)automatically,
if appropriate knowledge bases are available. Building and
maintaining such knowledge bases is however a tedious task,
as the number of software applications and le formats, and
especially their relation to each other, is very large. In this
paper, we therefore present an approach to automatically
build knowledge bases for Preservation Planing from already
existing, open resources. One such source is the community
maintained Freebase, which contains linked data on many
topics, among them le formats, software applications, and
most importantly, their relations, in a structured manner.
We demonstrate the applicability of these knowledge bases
by automatically identifying possible digital preservative ac-
tions on a uses case, an eScience experiment from the do-
main of data mining. This use case originates from the task
of process preservation, where we look beyond single les,
but regard complete chains of executions as the objects to
be preserved.

Automatic Discovery of Preservation Alternatives
Supported by Community Maintained Knowledge Bases
Rudolf Mayer, Johannes Binder,
Stephan Strodl
Secure Business Austria
Vienna, Austria
Andreas Rauber
Vienna University of Technology
& Secure Business Austria
Vienna, Austria
ABSTRACT
Preservation Planning, which deals with selecting the most
appropriate preservation action to be applied to digital ob-
jects, is an important step in any digital preservation activ-
ity. Comprehensive Preservation Planning depends on the
availability of identi ed alternatives of preservation actions,
which are for example le format migrations to migrate data
in an outdated format to one that has better support. Also
emulation, e.g. of the behaviour of a speci c software ap-
plication (application emulation), can be a viable preserva-
tion action. The alternative identi cation step can either be
performed manually by an expert, or (semi-)automatically,
if appropriate knowledge bases are available. Building and
maintaining such knowledge bases is however a tedious task,
as the number of software applications and le formats, and
especially their relation to each other, is very large. In this
paper, we therefore present an approach to automatically
build knowledge bases for Preservation Planing from already
existing, open resources. One such source is the community
maintained Freebase, which contains linked data on many
topics, among them le formats, software applications, and
most importantly, their relations, in a structured manner.
We demonstrate the applicability of these knowledge bases
by automatically identifying possible digital preservative ac-
tions on a uses case, an eScience experiment from the do-
main of data mining. This use case originates from the task
of process preservation, where we look beyond single les,
but regard complete chains of executions as the objects to
be preserved.