The Project

Our Mission

The volume of digital information around us is growing rapidly, and is causing an increasing pace of data transfer from active IT systems to digital repositories, libraries and archives. The diversity in size and complexity of creators of digital resources implies that digital repository systems must become highly scalable and adaptable to various types of digital objects, and their input, storage and access. Existing methods of digital preservation and curation are labour intensive and often require specialist skills. To meet the preservation needs of the on-coming 揳valanche?of digital content, it is necessary to find new levels of automation and self-reliance in preservation solutions. The mission of the PROTAGE project is to investigate and initiate complementary new approaches to digital preservation that make long-term digital preservation easy enough for users to be able to help preserving their own content, while reducing the cost and increasing the capacity of memory institutions to preserve digital information.

Our Approach

The PROTAGE approach to digital preservation is based on pro-active autonomous software agents that are independent of hardware and software technologies. This represents a shift of focus in digital preservation from information systems to preservation-friendly digital objects. The idea is to link these digital objects to long-term digital preservation processes by using agent-based software technology. The PROTAGE project will, based on the latest research on digital preservation strategies and on autonomous systems, build and validate flexible and extensible software agents for long-term digital preservation and access that can cooperate with and be integrated in existing and new preservation systems.

Our Objectives

  • Research the potential of software agent ecosystems to support the automation of digital preservation tasks;
  • Demonstrate the technical feasibility of such a system;
  • Analyse implementation in different organisational environments;
  • Explore possible integration with other digital preservation environments;
  • Explore synergies with other RTD activities in digital preservation.

Our End-Users

The target end users of the PROTAGE project are digital curators and content creators, including individuals creating and managing their own digital information. The developed solutions will be flexible and extensible, so that they can be utilised by archives, libraries, museums, private and public sector organisations and individuals

Agent Ecosystems

The PROTAGE point of view is to consider challenges in digital preservation by using concepts of Agent Ecosystems. An agent ecosystem is a bio-inspired open-ended environment populated by autonomous agents which interact in a flexible way. Autonomous agents can be regarded as similar to biological entities that are provided with some initial energy, abilities and capabilities of learning from their experience.

Self-Organization And Self-Adaptation

Self-organization and self-adaptation are two facets in digital preservation introduced by the PROTAGE approach. Self-adaptive systems work in a top-down manner. They evaluate their own global behaviour and change it when the evaluation indicates that they are not accomplishing what they were intended to do, or when better functionality or performance is possible. Such systems typically operate with an explicit internal representation of themselves and their global goals. Self-organizing systems work in the bottom-up principle. They are composed of a large number of components that interact according to simple and local rules. The global behaviour of the system emerges from these local interactions, and it is difficult to deduce properties of the global system by studying only the local properties of its parts. Such systems do not use internal representations of global properties or goals; they are often inspired by biological or sociological phenomena.

Intended Application Areas

Intended application areas of PROTAGE agent technology in digital preservation include:
  • Submission and ingest of digital material - Digital resources that are to be submitted to a repository are usually checked for consistency in terms of file formats and metadata. Currently, this puts substantial workload on the personnel responsible for handling the submissions, either at the submitting side or at the receiving side. Agent based digital preservation solution will lighten this burden, since ingest can be heavily automated, both in metadata collection and in the quality assurance of the delivered resources. Another way of lightening this process is that the agent-based systems are also open for automatically shortening the period of transfer of inactive records to an archive. Agents could also be configured to exercise certain control over the objects intended for archiving, within the system in which they are created and maintained.
  • Monitoring preservation?Globally, the volume of digital information to be preserved for the medium to longer term is colossal. Encapsulation of repository data within agents reduces their complexity and increases their manageability. Monitoring the preservation system with the help of analysis agents will reduce complexity, making preservation activities easier and will support dynamic and flexible organization of personal and institutional information repositories, distributed over the web. These in turn enable sharing of information between users at the knowledge-level, and automated discovery of new relevant information through collaborative information exchange between software agents.
  • Transfer between repositories- Instead of having to manually schedule for large deliveries of digital material at both the transferring and receiving repository, software agents can negotiate between themselves when the delivery should be made in order to minimize impact on both network traffic as well as on the systems and storage solutions in respective repositories.

The following figure shows the workflow according to application areas in PROTAGE and its target end users. In this figure, the PROTAGE concept is described in terms of functionalities of several kinds of agents, namely, Ingest Agents, Transfer Agents and Monitoring Agents. These agents can interact with Repositories and Content providers who can be represented by agents, too. End users are also represented by agents that act on their behalf.

Expected Results

  • Allow content producers to create and publish in a preservation-compatible manner,
  • Provide digital repositories with means of further automating the preservation processes,
  • Facilitate seamless interoperation between content providers, libraries and archives, and end-users throughout Europe.

Scientific Advisory Board

  • Professor Ann Hagerfors, Computer and Systems Science, Luleå University of Technology, Scientific Coordinator of PROTAGE
  • Professor Karen Andersen, Archive and Information Science, Mid Sweden University
  • Dr. Berndt Fredriksson, Foreign Ministry, Sweden

  • Professor Karin Axelsson, Health Science, Luleå University of Technology, the PROTAGE ETHICS Advisory Board