BACKGROUND Freeze-drying sperm has been developed as a new preservation method where liquid nitrogen is no longer necessary. An advantage of freeze-drying sperm is that it can be stored at 4 °C and transported at room temperature. Although the successful freeze-drying of sperm has been reported in a number of animals, the possibility of long-term preservation using this method has not yet been ...

The major digital preservation initiatives are about as old as the idea of the Semantic Web but the research areas only had little effect upon each other. This article identifies connections between the two research agendas. Three types of ageing processes are distinguished which affect digital records: media ageing, semantic ageing, and cultural ageing. It is argued that a period of 100 years ...

The product lifecycle spans from idea generation, design, manufacturing, and service to disposal. During all these phases, engineers use their knowledge to fulfill their tasks. If engineers retire or leave a company, their embodied knowledge also resigns. To circumvent such loss of important company’s intellectual property, and to enable traceability and reuse of product data in the future, the...

The rapidly growing production of digital data, together with their increasing importance and essential demands for their longevity, urgently require systems that provide reliable long-term preservation of digital objects. Most importantly, these systems have to ensure guaranteed availability over a long period of time, as well as integrity and authenticity of the preserved data and their metad...