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GCN Home > 06/19/06 issue

Modern Relics

NIST and others work on how to preserve data for later use

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

It’s a threat to any agency data-sharing initiative. It can render a knowledge management system obsolete. And in the future, it could mean the difference between a successful space launch and a trip back to the drawing board. It is, simply, data loss. Or data degradation. Or even data alteration. As more of what government creates in support of its mission is rendered digitally, experts must struggle with questions of how to ensure that digital data is available—and reliable—for future users.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology hosted a workshop in March on long-term knowledge retention, looking for answers to the questions of what digital data government, industry and academe should be saving, and how it should be saved.

They came up with no immediate answers, but they confirmed that a problem certainly exists and it’s growing, said Josh Lubell, a computer scientist in NIST’s Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory.

According to estimates offered at the workshop, the world churns out enough digital data to fill the Library of Congress every 15 minutes. Much of that is of no interest to anybody and can be discarded quickly. But in areas such as engineering, the production of information is outpacing our ability to ensure it will be available to those who may need and want to share it later on. As computer-aided evolves into computergenerated, terabytes of data are disappearing, or becoming inaccessible or corrupted every day.

“So much information is digital, and people are feeling the pain of losing access to their information,” Lubell said.

The attendees at the workshop agreed on the need to establish a business case for long-term data archiving and to develop standards for ensuring interoperability of data across time as well as across hardware and software platforms.

Specifically, engineering and design drawings are routinely saved today, said Doug Cheney, an interoperability consultant and product director for ITI TranscenData of Milford, Ohio. But unlike blueprints of the past, computer-aided design drawings, which are becoming increasingly important elements of geospatial initiatives, represent only the tip of the design iceberg.

“Digital data is not hardened, especially 3-D geometry,” Cheney said. “It is very interpretive, so it’s easy for unexpected things to creep in.”

More news on related topics: Storage Management, Content / Record Management, Knowledge Management, Management, IT Management



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