DURAFILE · Innovative Digital Preservation using Social Search in Agent Environments

Digital preservation (DP) represents the management of digital information over time to guarantee their accessibility and preserved quality. It includes processes and activities that ensure access to information and all types of records, scientific and cultural heritage that is stored in digital formats. Digital preservation offers assurance that digital information can be accessed continuously at any time and across shifts of technical generations that occur approximately every 5 to 15 years.We propose the DURAFILE platform that can be defined as a platform made by intelligent agents that exchanges dynamic knowledge and information among them (as a type of social search) with the goal of finding suitable preservation plans for obsolete multimedia digital objects. This represents a complete solution for multimedia digital preservation, that is extensible and flexible, always up-to-date as the information it contains is alive and real time accessible. DURAFILE can ensure that their information will remain available in the future, no matter how the technology evolves or current data formats become obsolete. The DURAFILE social features represent a unique approach to digital preservation as the knowledge base grows with its usage. .DURAFILE will improve the competitiveness of the European economy in several ways: 1) Tapping into a huge market potential due to the vast potential user list and exponential growth of digital data 2) First-mover advantage in comparison to non-European countries that are not using DURAFILE.DURAFILE will be available as a) web application to scan the files for professional users, including big institutions or SMEs that need to handle a large amount of information that needs to be preserved, b) downloadable client to scan locally as the most common antivirus systems do, for regular home users who need more than a backup for their multimedia files.