Digital Preservation Challenges on Software Life Cycle

TIMBUS is a partially EU-funded research project in the area of digital preservation. The project aims at a holistic view on the preservation of business processes over long-term periods. This view includes the business software as a well as all related context information for re-use at a later point in time. Digital preservation ensures continued access to digital information over time (e.g., 5, 15, 25 or 50 years). The long-term planning horizon of preserving relevant parts of a business processes raises a number of new research challenges for software design, development and maintenance. Current service-oriented systems are using distributed services from different providers located at different geographical locations. Workflows and business processes are volatile in terms of services disappearing and fundamental changes in technology. TIMBUS researches on methods, processes and tools to ensure continued access to information based on preserving relevant data and their context (e.g., services, software and the data's meaning). The project aims at identifying, capturing and preserving relevant information and their dependencies necessary to understand the preserved business processes in a remote future. In this paper we describe the primary objectives of the TIMBUS project with special focus on challenges caused by the preservation of software.