This presentation was delivered by Jun Zhang (King’s College London), Patricia Falcao (Tate) and Maria Akritidou (DOTSOFT S.A.) at PERICLES final project conference 'Acting on Change: New Approaches and Future Practices in LTDP' (Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, London, 30 Nov -1 Dec 2016). This 'PERICLES in practice' session aimed at demonstrating how risks to digital video artworks and archived space science experiments can be monitored, assessed and visualised. The 'PERICLES in practice' sessions presented specific outcomes of the PERICLES project set in an example workflow, combining tools to accomplish a goal defined by practitioners and derived from real life challenges they experience in their field of work.

1. GRANT AGREEMENT: 601138 | SCHEME FP7 ICT 2011.4.3
Promoting and Enhancing Reuse of Information throughout the Content Lifecycle taking account of Evolving
Semantics [Digital Preservation]
“This project has received funding from the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological
development and demonstration under grant agreement no601138”.
Jun Zhang (King’s College London)
Patricia Falcao (Tate)
Simon Waddington (King’s College London)
Maria Akritidou (DOTSOFT S.A.)

2. Technical Appraisal Tool

3.  Introduction
 Appraisal of digital objects at Tate
 Functionality
 Features
 Architecture and implementation
Overview

4.  Technical appraisal is the process of determining
the (on-going) feasibility of preserving the digital
objects
◦ Maintenance in a reusable form
◦ Takes into account obsolescence of software, formats etc.
 Aim to produce a general purpose tool
◦ Conference demonstrator is for digital video
Introduction

5.  Circa 500 video artworks, increasing at c. 50 works
per year
 Limited (though increasing) and familiar technologies.
In-house experience and regular use.
 Production environment similar to quality checking
environment.
 Existing network of experts
 Common technologies within the communities of
Practice
Bruce Nauman, Violent Incident 1986 (T06732)

6.  Currently 10 artworks
 4 different Operating Systems
 4 to 5 programming languages and a large number of
other technology dependencies
 Experience and use of the technologies in house is
limited
 Network of experts is very limited at the moment, and
each work depends on the specific artist's knowledge
about a system.
 Specific knowledge about one work not necessarily
helpful for other works, also across communities of
practice
Jose Carlos Martinat, Ambiente de Stereo Realidad Brutalismo 2007
Software based art at Tate

7. Jose Carlos Martinat, Ambiente de Stereo Realidad Brutalismo 2007
How about the rest of Tate?
?

8. We can envisage using an appraisal tool in a series of
contexts:
 Flagging obsolescent technologies
 Planning migration of video or software-based
artworks
 Prioritising migration or treatments of software-based
artworks
 Understanding the impact of that obsolescence, in
combination with MICE and the ecosystem models
Appraisal of Digital Objects at Tate

9. Demonstrates use of:
External data sources to estimate risk (e.g.
obsolescence, hardware failure)
◦ Search engines
◦ Software repositories
◦ Wikipedia
 Ecosystem models
◦ PERICLES Digital Video Art (DVA) ontology and Linked Resource
Model (LRM)
◦ Captures dependencies between artwork components
◦ Represents expert knowledge about video playback
Features

10.  Collection and object level risk assessment for complex digital
objects
◦ Support proximity estimation and confidence estimates
 Component level risk analysis
◦ Identify high-risk components across collections
◦ Provide graphical views
 Object-level risk analysis
◦ Presents risks to individual components in an object
◦ Determine potential recoverability actions
 Link to MICE tool for impact visualisation (in progress)
Functionality

11. Integration
Workflow
Engine
PERSIsT API
retrieves
dependencies
and impact
forwards
Change (LRM delta)
visualises
impact
accepts /
rejects
change
Entity Registry Model Repository (ERMR)
saves
change
Technical Appraisal
Tool
recovery
options
inserts
new
Media /
selects
recovery
option
returns user’s
decision
sends change
(RDF triples)
retrieves
dependencies
and costs writes
recovery
options

12.  Java web services framework
based on Apache Tomcat
 Components written in R
and Python
 User interface uses HTML5,
JavaScript and CSS3
 Due for release – first
quarter of 2017
Service Layer
External Data Sources
Storage Layer
User Interface
Web Server
Metadata
Extraction
Statistical
Analysis
Risk-
impact
Analysis
Instance
Store
Knowledge
Base
Data
Harvester

13. Model Impact Change Explorer
(MICE)

14.  Introduction
 Purpose
 Impact assessment
 MICE User Interface
Overview

15.  Change is inevitable in any long-lived system.
 If significant change occurs, it may impair or obstruct
data reuse, access or interpretation.
 Model Impact Change Explorer (MICE) is a
visualization tool that allows users to evaluate how a
potential change to a resource will impact the overall
ecosystem.
Introduction

16.  Allows the user to view a proposed change to a
resource and identify possible negative impacts or
consequences of the change to the overall ecosystem
BEFORE the change is submitted.
 Gives the user the option to decide on whether to
save the change or discard it, ensuring that the
digital ecosystem remains in a good (stable) state.
Purpose

17.  To assess and manage change to a resource we need to
understand the dependencies (relationships) between resources
in the digital ecosystem.
 Resources and their dependencies are described in the ontology
stored in the Entity Registry Model Repository (ERMR).
 To identify the impact of change MICE uses an intermediate
component for semantic interpretation of the ontology stored
on the ERMR (PERSIsT API).
Impact assessment

18.  MICE queries the PERSIsT API using the following parameters:
ERMR repository
Delta stream
 PERSIsT creates a dependency graph for the changed resource(s)
derived from the delta description containing the impact
assessment results. The graph is returned to MICE in JSON.
 MICE processes the results and calculates the overall impact on
the ecosystem.
 MICE displays a visualization of the dependency graph using the
D3 JS library.
Dependency graph

19. Integration
Workflow
Engine
PERSIsT API
retrieves
dependencies
and impact
forwards
Change (LRM delta)
visualises
impact
accepts /
rejects
change
Entity Registry Model Repository (ERMR)
saves
change
Technical Appraisal
Tool
recovery
options
inserts
new
Media /
selects
recovery
option
returns user’s
decision
sends change
(RDF triples)
retrieves
dependencies
and costs writes
recovery
options

20. Digital Video 1 has
an AVI container
The AVI container has a
software dependency from
certain media players
Windows Media Player 12 has a
compatibility dependency from
certain operating systems
Windows 7 has a
compatibility dependency
from certain resources

21. Available on GitHub:
https://github.com/pericles-project/MICE