ESA PLANS – A PATHFINDER FOR LONG TERM  DATA PRESERVATION
Digital preservation is difficult. The technical difficulties
are the cause of much research. Other types of difficulty are
those to do with organisational commitment, funding and
context.
With the increasing interest on global change monitoring,
also the use and exploitation of long time series of Earth
Observation (EO) data has been increasing systematically,
calling for a need to preserve the EO data without time
constrains.
On the other hand:
· Data archiving and preservation strategies are still
mostly limited to the satellite lifetime and few years
after.
· The data volumes are increasing dramatically.
· Archiving and data access technology are evolving
rapidly.
· EO data archiving strategies, if existing at all, are
different for each EO mission, each operator or
agency.
In the meantime the issue grows more urgent since more
and more EO missions’ data can be called ‘historic’ and more
and more operators are faced with the decision of whether
and how to preserve their data.
This paper describes the European Space Agency’s (ESA)
plans for long term commitment to preserving EO data
concerning Europe. We believe this shows that ESA provides
a pathfinder example of the way in which all these difficulties
can be tackled.
["Beruti, Vincenzo", "Giaretta, David", "Conway, Esther", "Forcada, M.Eugenia", "Albani, Mirko"]
[]