ACM TechNews

NCSA Plays Key Role in Digital Archiving Project

NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) (07/08)

The University of Illinois is one of the lead institutions for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP), a massive Library of Congress effort to save at-risk digital materials. At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, the Digital Library Technologies group is working on the semantic archiving aspect of NDIPP by working with a team from the library with the objective of building a proof-of-concept semantic archive to demonstrate how semantic inference capability could help next-generation archives head off long-term preservation risks. To meaningfully preserve digital content over time, it is necessary to infer meaning or semantics from structures that change over time, but given the incredible and increasing volume of digital data being created, automated tools are a necessity for such a task. Information science research associate Dave Dubin has created BECHAMEL, software that flags possible points of information loss or confusion to reduce long-term preservation risks. BECHAMEL is the result of a joint research effort by the University of Illinois, the University of Bergen, and the World Wide Web Consortium to develop a research platform for the interpretation of structured digital documents.

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/News/08/0701NCSAplays.html

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