Researchers seek to preserve data for posterity

Nature : Because of the vast amounts of data being generated by current large-scale projects such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, various groups around the world are proposing methods to preserve them and the methods used to analyze them for future generations of scientists. The internationally formed DPHEP is pushing to make such data available to the public. Not only would this help preserve the data, but it would also allow the data to continue to be mined for new experiments. Meanwhile, a group in the US, called DASPOS (Data and Software Preservation for Open Science), has been working to design a data storage template so that future scientists will be able to re-create an experiment’s results. At DESY in Germany, researchers have been devising a system to repeatedly migrate data and software onto new platforms to remain current with new operating systems. Although efforts to reconstruct and preserve data can be expensive, those involved point out that the cost is minimal compared with the total operating cost of these large-scale projects.