TOWARDS COMPUTERIZED DIGITAL PRESERVATION BASED ON INTELLIGENT AGENTS AND WEB SERVICES

The explosively growing volume of digital information results in pressing demands to transfer digital objects from active IT systems to digital repositories, libraries, and archives for long-term preservation. However, existing strategies of digital preservation are labour intensive and often require specialist skills. In order to meet the preservation demands of immense digital information, it is necessary to find new levels of automation and self-reliance in preservation strategies. On the other hand, intelligent agent technology is widely viewed as a promising approach to developing large-scale complex software systems. It has already been successfully applied in some industrial and commercial areas. Meanwhile, Web services have evolved into a key paradigm for distributed computing. They provide an efficient way to realize loosely-coupled architecture and interoperable solutions across heterogeneous platforms and systems. Therefore, Web services have received great attention from both industry and academia. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no initiatives that employ the technologies of intelligent agents and Web services as the general methodology to study long-term digital preservation in the open literature. In this paper, we describe an intelligent agent and Web service based architecture of the PROTAGE system, which is funded by the European FP7 Research Programme and aims to computerize long-term digital preservation. We discuss the fundamental agents involved in the PROTAGE system as well as their interactions. We further present a general framework of automated decision making based on intelligent agents and Web services, which are crucial for the automation of long-term digital preservation. Finally, we discuss several key issues related to the implementation of the PROTAGE system.