The Preservation of Digital Data for the long term presents a variety of challenges. First and foremost, there is the technical challenge. How to avoid loosing data because of changes in the storage medium, decives, and data formats? How to be able to run a viewer in the future for an archived multimedia file, or a computer aided design system, or even popular game? Then, there are social and behavioral aspects. Which information needs to be archive, who decides? What about intellectual property, proof of authenticity, etc.? Clearly, all aspects will require much work before full solutions may be proposed and implemented. This paper focuses solely on the technical aspects of the problem, and more precisely, on how to interpret a bit stream that has been successfully archived and later retrieved.
A distinction is made between archiving a data file and archiving a program (so that its behavior may be reenacted in the future), and a research direction is proposed for both problems, based on the same basic mechanism.
For the archiving of a data file, the proposal consists of specifying the processing that needs to be performed on the data (as physically stored) in order to return the information to a future client (according to a logical view of the data). The Process specification and the logical view definition need to be archived with the data.
For the archiving of a program behavior, the proposal consists of saving the original executable object code together with the specification of the processing that needs to be performed for each machine instruction of the original computer.
Both processing specifications are based on the use of a Universal Virtual Computer that is general yet basic enough as to remain relevant in the future.
By: Raymond A. Lorie
Published in: RJ10185 in 2000
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