About Data and Software Preservation for Open Science (DASPOS)

The DASPOS project represents a collective effort to explore the realization of a viable data, software, and computation preservation architecture for High Energy Physics (HEP). We use the term preservation to mean “Ensuring the continued usability of the data and software necessary to conduct science.” Preservation has many elements, including a physical archival system for storing data, an organization and policy for deciding what to store and for how long, and technical means for organizing and representing data and software so that they remain usable. This project will focus primarily on the latter two elements by building a community understanding of the organizational needs and by building software prototypes to address the most critical technical problems.

This project is divided into two distinct but mutually-informing activities:

• The discovery and coordination activity will bring together a broad community of experts and stakeholders to define, discuss, and document the details of data and software preservation for high energy physics and other fields. This activity will be organized as a series of highly structured public workshops that will result in a series of detailed public documents.
• The prototyping and experimentation activity will address two essential problems in preservation by constructing prototype software and gaining experience through experimentation. The two key areas of research are the data and query models and the software sustainability models. The two areas will be joined in the final year to undertake the Curation Challenge.

The project team includes computer science experts from the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, physicists from the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC, the DØ experiment at the Tevatron, experts in other data-intensive fields such as bioinformatics and astrophysics, and digital librarians with broad experience in the preservation of large datasets in the sciences and humanities.