Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, Institute of Computer Science
Information Systems Laboratory
FORTH-ICS
www.ics.forth.gr
Epimenides:
An Information System offering Automated Reasoning for the
Needs of Digital Preservation
Overview
Digital material has to be preserved not only against loss or
corruption, but also against changes in its ecosystem. A quite
general view of the digital preservation problem is to
approach it from a dependency management point of view.
Epimenides is a system that offers novel dependency
management services for digital preservation. A distinctive
feature is that it can model also converters and emulators,
and the adopted modelling approach enables the automatic
reasoning needed for reducing the human effort required
for checking (and monitoring) whether a task on a digital
object (digital collection in general) is performable.
www.ics.forth.gr/isl/epimenides/
Fig.1: Checking the performability over a
digital object
Target Applications
Epimenides can be used by digital archives and digital
libraries to help archivists in checking whether the archived
digital artifacts remain intelligible and functional, and in
identifying the consequences of probable losses.
Epimenides could also be used by providers of virtualization
services.
Description
Since conversion (else migration) and emulation are
fundamental
preservation
strategies,
a
dependency
management approach should allow modelling explicitly
converters and emulators, and also exploit their capabilities.
This is of paramount importance since a sequence of
conversions and emulations can be enough for vanishing the
gap that prevents performing a task on a digital object. Since
there is a plethora of emulation and migration approaches
that concern various layers of a computer system (from
hardware to software), or various source/target formats, it is
Fig. 2: Use Case Diagram of Epimenides
FORTH-ICS
www.ics.forth.gr
beneficial to use advanced knowledge management
techniques for aiding the exploitation of all possibilities that
the existing and emerging emulators/converters enable, and
assist preservation planning. This is crucial since the scale and
complexity of information assets and systems evolve towards
overwhelming the capability of human archivists and curators
(either system administrators, programmers or designers).
Epimenides is the first system that offers automated
reasoning for (a) Task-Performability Checking, (b)
Consequences of a Hypothetical Loss and (c) Identification of
Missing Modules. A Use Case Diagram providing an overview
of the supported use cases is given in Figure 2. Figure 3 shows
an indicative screenshot showing the results from the analysis
of the three uploaded digital objects. For the first file it is
being reported that the selected task (i.e. Rendering) cannot
be performed over that digital object. In contrast, for the last
two files the selected tasks can be performed successfully.
Epimenides is based on W3C standards, and its Knowledge
Base (expressed using RDF/S) contains information about all
MIME types and the modeling of various quite common tasks
(currently it contains around 2,225 RDF triples). Since it is
based on Semantic Web technologies it can be
straightforwardly enriched with information coming from
other external sources (i.e. other SPARQL endpoints).
Epimenides was partially supported by the APARSEN
Network of Excellence.
Fig. 3:
Results of analysis
Fig. 4: Main menu of Epimenides
Additional Information
More information is available at the website of Epimenides:
http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl/epimenides/
Epimenides website
Contact details:
Yannis Tzitzikas
tzitzik@ics.forth.gr
www.ics.forth.gr/isl