Digital Preservation in Data-Driven Science: On the Importance of Process Capture, Preservation and Validation

Current digital preservation is strongly biased towards data objects: digital files of document-style objects, or encapsulated and largely self-contained objects. To provide authenticity and provenance information, comprehensive metadata models are deployed to document information on an object’s context. Yet, we claim that simply documenting an objects context may not be sufficient to ensure proper provenance and to fulfill the stated preservation goals. Specifically in e-Science and business settings, capturing, documenting and preserving entire processes may be necessary to meet the preservation goals. We thus present an approach for capturing, documenting and preserving processes, and means to assess their authenticity upon re-execution. We will discuss options as well as limitations and open challenges to achieve sound preservation, specifically within scientific processes.