DIGITAL LIFE CYCLE

Digital life cycle



Digital life Cycle

Introduction

The ephemeral character of digital data and information leads into serious issues in preserving information over the long term. Digital preservation aims at ensuring the operability and usability of digital information. The long term preservation of business process raises a number of new challenges with respect to software development and maintenance.

The TIMBUS 1 project aims at providing methodologies, tools and guidelines that support the preservation of existing business processes and the creation of new "preservation-aware" processes.

Business processes are an orchestration of different services

Many of these services are operated by different service providers. Processes are volatile in terms of services disappearing and fundamental changes in technology. Processes of vital interest in a remote future need to be preserved.

Their functionality, usability, integrity and authenticity need to be guaranteed. Examples for business processes are present in domains such as civil engineering, e-Science, multimedia productions and particle physics. Changes of technology (e.g., new formats or standards), changes of the environment (e.g., new legal obligations) and the disappearance of services need to be addressed for ensuring the usability of the process and its software in the long run.

Current maintenance approaches for software are dealing with online (and active) systems. Changes in the environment, technology, services and data potentially have immediate effects on the system functionality. For preserved software stored off-line in an archive these changes can remain concealed for years. New approaches for active management and maintenance of preserved information systems are required. The risk of irreconcilable inconsistency of the software system caused by technological obsolescence or unavailability of essential services and software components need to be addressed (Eastin, 2011, 33).

Preservation of software systems raise new challenges for all stages of the software life cycle. Starting from the design phase, well-documented and clearly designed structures of software reduce the dependencies on actual implementation technology. Other examples are requirements on the software quality raised by the fact that source code should be understood in the future. Maintenance over the long term can include the replacement of obsolete technologies, such as runtime environments, operating systems, networking infrastructures, etc. Other research issues that are addressed within the TIMBUS project include, amongst others, authenticity of the preserved information, legal/contractural/regulatory issues and risk management with respect to business process preservation (Feigenbaum, 2008).

Software Quality

Software Quality Signi?cant progress has been made over the last years in the understanding of software quality. The well established ISO 9126 provide a suitable guidance for continuous maintenance of a software product.

With the need of preserving digitally born information new requirements came up for software and software quality.

In order to transform data into information some kind of representation information is needed. A powerful representation information is the software that generated the data.

For preservation of information for decades it is obvious that software could need to be maintained for a long time. The difference to the established maintenance approaches is the fact that archived software stays unchanged for a long period.

The development process has often to be re-instantiated in a ...