Thomas Liebetraut

Emulation-as-a-Service - The Past in the Cloud

Until now, emulation of legacy architectures has mostly been seen as a tool for hobbyists and as technical nostalgia. However, in a world in which research and development is producing almost entirely digital artifacts, new and efficient concepts for preservation and re-use are required. Furthermore, a significant amount of todays cultural work is purely digital. Hence, emulation technology appeals to a wider, non-technical, user-group since many of our digital objects cannot be re-used properly without a suitable runtime environment. This article presents a scalable and cost-effective Cloud-based Emulation-as-a-Service (EaaS) architecture, enabling a wide range of non-technical users to access emulation technology in order to re-enact their digital belongings. Together with a distributed storage and data management model we present an implementation from the domain of digital art to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed EaaS architecture.

An Architecture for Community-Based Curation and Presentation of Complex Digital Objects

Preservation of complex, non-linear digital objects such as digital art or ancient computer environments has been a domain reserved for experts until now. Digital culture, however, is a broader phenomenon. With the introduction of the so-called Web 2.0 digital culture became a mass culture. New methods of content creation, publishing and cooperation lead to new cultural achievements. Therefore, novel tools and strategies are required, both for preservation but in particular for curation and presentation. We propose a scaleable architecture suitable to create a community driven platform for preservation and curation of complex digital objects. Further, we provide novel means for presenting preserved results including technical meta-data, and thus, allowing for public review and potentially further community induced improvements.

The RESTful EMiL: Integrating emulation into library reading rooms

Emulation of Multimedia objects in Libraries (EMiL) is a web-based emulation service environment for library reading rooms that addresses the challenges of accessing large born-digital collections. In particular, we present an automated process to gather technical metadata necessary to initiate an emulation session that renders a user-chosen object as well as a technical design that allows a seamless integration into existing web-based catalogues. The primary focus is on providing access to multimedia CD-ROMs of the 1990s and 2000s, but the EMiL system is designed to be used with other digital collections as well.

Preserving Containers – Requirements and a Todo-List

Container technology has been quickly adopted as a tool to encapsulate and share complex software setups, e.g. in the domain of computational science. With growing significance of this class of complex digital objects their longevity is also of growing importance. In this paper we analyze requirements for long-term maintenance and preservation of containers in memory institutions.

Emulation-as-a-Service - Workflows and Infrastructure to Support Recomputable Science

The computational age and its fast technological progress boosted research output of almost all disciplines. However, these early benefits come along with a burden: while the exchange of research data and ideas is easier and more effective than ever, assuring both short- and long-term access to fundamental scientific methods is more difficult than anticipated. In particular, functional access to data processing methods, tool-chains and scientific workflows is indispensable in order to verify and replicate research findings. This article is proposing emulation as a technique for generalization of data processing environments, serving as first step towards long-term accessibility of research data and associated methods. We present a Cloud-based emulation-as-a-service framework for publication and citation of scientific workflows and research data, since having re-usable processing environments, emulation can be used for technical verification of research data, i.e. Ensure minimal quality assurance like completeness and an explicit list of potential external dependencies, fundamental for future risk-assessment.