Database preservation

Abstract: PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a server for storing electric home appliance information, capable of easily storing data related to the state and the operation history of an electric home appliance connected to a network, and capable of making a response when the data is requested in a short processing time.SOLUTION: The server for storing electric home appliance information includes: a communication unit for receiving a data output from an electric home appliance; a storage unit for storing the data received by the communication unit; a database generation unit for generating or updating a database from the data stored in the storage unit; and a database preservation unit for preserving the database generated by the database generation unit.

Abstract: This article outlines past and present practice in the long‐term preservation of databases. It describes one typology of databases affecting preservation methods. It also covers some outstanding challenges to database preservation and gives pointers to further reading on database preservation activity around the world.

Abstract: Relational databases are complex digital objects and their preservation is a challenging problem. The DBPreserve project has proposed a solution that implements the migration from a relational model to a dimensional model, storing all the relevant data in a data warehouse. A data warehouse can be implemented in multi-dimensional structures, or in relational databases that represent the dimensional model concepts in the relational model, as was used in this project. As a second step in the preservation process, the Open Archival Information Systems for Database Preservation proposed here complements the representation of information in the data warehouse, making it conform to the OAIS reference model and delivering a technologically-independent model for the preservation of complex digital records, such as those constituting the databases and data warehouses. A more technologicallyneutral format for database representation is obtained using XML-based files as a longterm preservation format. Regarding the OAIS reference model, this research reflects on the archival system entities and their characterization, focusing also on the structures of the Submission Information Package (SIP), the Archival Information Package (AIP) and the Dissemination Information Package (DIP), according to this project approach. This work presents the definition of the XML structure that extends the existing SIARD format used for the description and archival of relational databases, enriching it with a metadata layer for the description of the data warehouse components. The Data Warehouse Extensible Markup Language (DWXML) is the XML dialect proposed to describe the data warehouse. To acquire the relevant metadata for the data warehouse and build the archival format, the DBPreserve Suite application was developed. The DBPreserve Suite handles the migration process of the metadata and the primary data from the data warehouse to the extended SIARD format, and ensures the access to the primary data. The application integrates the SIARD Suite component which builds the SIARD format from a relational database, it allows metadata editing through graphical interfaces, displays visual representations of star or snowflake schemas as well as dimension, hierarchies and levels. The DBPreserve Suite also generates the DWXML dimensional model metadata layer and combines it with the SIARD format, enabling primary data browsing from the XMLbased format files generated.

Abstract: The need to preserve scientific, scholarly and cultural data has long been recognized. These data sets are valuable and many of them are either impossible to reproduce (e.g. climate and demographic data) or can only be recovered at enormous costs (e.g. data from high energy physics experiments). While substantial investment has been made in archiving and preserving conventional forms of these objects, such as documents, images and numerical data in some file format, the need to preserve entire databases has only recently emerged. Databases differ from fixed digital objects studied in the past, in that they change over time, they have internal structure, and they include schemas and integrity constraints, which are basic for the current and future interpretation of the data. Increasingly, database technology is being used in the storage of large numerical scientific data sets.