Preserving Data to Preserving Research: Curation of Process and Context: Workshops and Tutorials - iPRES 2014 - Melbourne

Abstract

Awareness of the need to provide digital preservation solutions is spreading from the core memory institutions to other domains, including government, industry, SME and consumers. In many of these settings we are, however, faced with preserving more than just data. In the domain of eScience, for example, investigations are increasingly collaborative. Most scientific and engineering domains benefit from building on the outputs of other research by sharing information to reason over and data to incorporate in the modeling task at hand. This raises the need for preserving and sharing entire eScience workflows and processes for later reuse. We need to define which information is to be collected, create means to preserve it and approaches to enable and validate the re-execution of a preserved process. This includes and goes beyond preserving the data used in the experiments, as the process underlying its creation and use is essential. The TIMBUS project and Wf4Ever project team up for this halfday tutorial to provide an introduction to the problem domain and discuss solutions for the curation of eScience processes.