FP7 Programme DURAFILE - Official Press Release

Thu, 19 Dec 2013

The DURAFILE project aims to develop a platform to create a common infrastructure that will facilitate the interchange of digital preservation plans for multimedia files.

Barcelona, October 2013 – Digital preservation has been recognized as a need related to the preservation of cultural heritage and information for the public and healthcare sectors. Public administrations, libraries and museums, cultural heritage organizations and even home users have to comply with legal requirements to preserve digital information adequately.

93% of the world’s information today is born digitally, most of it exclusively available in digital form. Due to rapid technological advancements in file formats and software, digital preservation has become an immediate business and societal need.

DURAFILE would mean digital preservation and represents the management of digital information over time to guarantee their accessibility and preserve their quality. The DURAFILE platform 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 digital objects. This represents a complete solution for multimedia digital preservation, which is extensible and flexible, always up-to-date as the information it contains is alive and real-time access.

With DURAFILE we will develop an intelligent and scalable platform that allows users to share their digital preservation solutions. Users in this platform will be represented by a group of Intelligent Agents that will ask other friends/trusted agents for a suitable preservation plan.
The user can choose to only view the preservation advice given by DURAFILE or to have DURAFILE identify and convert out-dated files in specific folders automatically. The user would then have the old file (in out-dated format) as well as the new file (in the new format).

The main outcome of the project will be i) the generation of a database of standard preservation plans for multimedia files; ii) the conversion of the out-dated files into standard formats preserving the quality.

The project began in October 2013 and will last for 24 months. The 1.132.000€ contribution from Brussels brings together 9 European research centers, universities, and national organizations from 6 different countries: France, Estonia, Greece, Romania represented by our company - ASSIST Software, Spain, and Turkey.

The DURAFILE project is co-funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme managed by REA-Research Executive Agency and submitted under program FP7-SME - Specific Programme "Capacities": Research for the benefit of SMEs, on-topic SME-2013-1 - Research for SMEs with the project ID: 605356.