GRANT AGREEMENT: 601138 | SCHEME FP7 ICT 2011.4.3 Promoting and Enhancing Reuse of Information throughout the Content Lifecycle taking account of Evolving Semantics [Digital Preservation]

“This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no601138”.

TECHNICAL APPRAISAL TOOL – MICEJun Zhang (King’s College London)Patricia Falcao (Tate)Simon Waddington (King’s College London)Maria Akritidou (DOTSOFT S.A.)

Technical Appraisal Tool

Introduction

Appraisal of digital objects at Tate

Functionality

Features

Architecture and implementation

Overview

Technical appraisal is the process of determining the (on-going) feasibility of preserving the digital objects◦ Maintenance in a reusable form ◦ Takes into account obsolescence of software, formats etc.

Aim to produce a general purpose tool◦ Conference demonstrator is for digital video

Introduction

Circa 500 video artworks, increasing at c. 50 works per year

Limited (though increasing) and familiar technologies. In-house experience and regular use.

Production environment similar to quality checking environment.

Existing network of expertsCommon technologies within the communities

of Practice

Digital video art at Tate

Bruce Nauman, Violent Incident 1986 (T06732)

Currently 10 artworks4 different Operating Systems4 to 5 programming languages and a large

number of other technology dependenciesExperience and use of the technologies in

house is limitedNetwork of experts is very limited at the

moment, and each work depends on the specific artist's knowledge about a system.

Specific knowledge about one work not necessarily helpful for other works, also across communities of practice

Jose Carlos Martinat, Ambiente de Stereo Realidad Brutalismo 2007

Software based art at Tate

Jose Carlos Martinat, Ambiente de Stereo Realidad Brutalismo 2007

How about the rest of Tate?

?

We can envisage using an appraisal tool in a series of contexts:

Flagging obsolescent technologies Planning migration of video or software-based

artworksPrioritising migration or treatments of software-

based artworksUnderstanding the impact of that obsolescence, in

combination with MICE and the ecosystem models

Appraisal of Digital Objects at Tate

Demonstrates use of:External data sources to estimate risk (e.g. obsolescence, hardware failure)

◦ Search engines◦ Software repositories◦ Wikipedia

Ecosystem models◦ PERICLES Digital Video Art (DVA) ontology and Linked Resource

Model (LRM)◦ Captures dependencies between artwork components ◦ Represents expert knowledge about video playback

Features

Collection and object level risk assessment for complex digital objects◦ Support proximity estimation and confidence estimates

Component level risk analysis ◦ Identify high-risk components across collections◦ Provide graphical views

Object-level risk analysis◦ Presents risks to individual components in an object◦ Determine potential recoverability actions

Link to MICE tool for impact visualisation (in progress)

Functionality

IntegrationWorkflow Engine

PERSIsT API

retrieves dependencies

and impact

forwardsChange (LRM delta)

visualises impact

accepts / rejects change

Entity Registry Model Repository (ERMR)

saves change

Technical Appraisal Tool

recovery options

inserts new

Media / selects

recovery option

returns user’s decision

sends change (RDF triples)

retrieves dependencies

and costs writes recovery options

Architecture and implementation

Java web services framework based on Apache Tomcat

Components written in R and Python

User interface uses HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3

Due for release – first quarter of 2017

Service Layer

External Data Sources

Storage Layer

User Interface

Web Server

Metadata Extraction

Statistical Analysis

Risk-impact

Analysis

Instance Store

Knowledge Base

Data Harvester

Model Impact Change Explorer (MICE)

Introduction

Purpose

Impact assessment

MICE User Interface

Overview

Change is inevitable in any long-lived system.

If significant change occurs, it may impair or obstruct data reuse, access or interpretation.

Model Impact Change Explorer (MICE) is a visualization tool that allows users to evaluate how a potential change to a resource will impact the overall ecosystem.

Introduction

Allows the user to view a proposed change to a resource and identify possible negative impacts or consequences of the change to the overall ecosystem BEFORE the change is submitted.

Gives the user the option to decide on whether to save the change or discard it, ensuring that the digital ecosystem remains in a good (stable) state.

Purpose

To assess and manage change to a resource we need to understand the dependencies (relationships) between resources in the digital ecosystem.

Resources and their dependencies are described in the ontology stored in the Entity Registry Model Repository (ERMR).

To identify the impact of change MICE uses an intermediate component for semantic interpretation of the ontology stored on the ERMR (PERSIsT API).

Impact assessment

MICE queries the PERSIsT API using the following parameters:ERMR repositoryDelta stream

PERSIsT creates a dependency graph for the changed resource(s) derived from the delta description containing the impact assessment results. The graph is returned to MICE in JSON.

MICE processes the results and calculates the overall impact on the ecosystem.

MICE displays a visualization of the dependency graph using the D3 JS library.

Dependency graph

IntegrationWorkflow Engine

PERSIsT API

retrieves dependencies

and impact

forwardsChange (LRM delta)

visualises impact

accepts / rejects change

Entity Registry Model Repository (ERMR)

saves change

Technical Appraisal Tool

recovery options

inserts new

Media / selects

recovery option

returns user’s decision

sends change (RDF triples)

retrieves dependencies

and costs writes recovery options

Example based on the Digital Video Art domain ontology

Digital Video 1 has an AVI container

The AVI container has a software dependency from

certain media players

Windows Media Player 12 has a compatibility dependency

from certain operating systems

Windows 7 has a compatibility dependency

from certain resources

Available on GitHub:https://github.com/pericles-project/MICE