Plato: a service oriented decision support system for preservation planning

The fast changes of technologies in today's information landscape have considerably shortened the lifespan of digital objects. Digital preservation has become a pressing challenge. Different strategies such as migration and emulation have been proposed; however, the decision for a specific tool e.g. for format migration or an emulator is very complex. The process of evaluating potential solutions against specific requirements and building a plan for preserving a given set of objects is called preservation planning. So far, it is a mainly manual, sometimes ad-hoc process with little or no tool support. This paper presents a service-oriented architecture and decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning process and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.