EUROPE: New software preserves digital data for future

Researchers say they have secured the future of Europe's huge volumes of digital data, having created open source software that will protect digital data from becoming unreadable or unusable because of incompatibility with newer technologies.

The European Union-funded programme Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval, or CASPAR, developed the software.

"Until now large volumes of electronic data such as official records, museum archives and scientific results have been unreadable or at risk of loss because newer technologies could not read it or allow current users to understand it," says a communiqué from the European Commission, which contributed EUR8.8 million (US$1.15 million) to the project.

The problem arises because different types of data are encoded differently, and the technology to read them in the future may be obsolete or unavailable, rendering the data useless for future researchers and citizens.

The CASPAR open source software, however, provides "secure, reliable and cost-effective preservation of digitally encoded information for the indefinite future," according to a CASPAR website. The software allows any digital data to be extracted and understood in the future, no matter how the data were created, encoded or stored.

This is particularly useful for research taking place over very long periods of time, such as in the fields of astronomy or climatology. For example, data collection mapping the human impact on climate change over the past 50 years has evolved from rather primitive punch cards to magnetic tapes and finally to the current digital cloud computing storage systems. The CASPAR open source software will help ensure various digital data types will still be usable today and in the future.

The project, which involved researchers from the Czech Republic, France, Greece, Israel, Italy and the UK, complements the EU's Digital Agenda for Europe adopted by the Commission in May 2010. The action plan is intended to encourage growth in information and communications technologies in an effort to improve the digital economy and benefit European citizens.

Researchers involved in the project include those from the University of Glasgow, Scotland; Italy's Università di Urbana; the University of Leeds, England; France's Centre National de Recherche Scientifique; and Greece's Foundation for Research and Technology.

The software is now available for download here