ESA PLANS – A PATHFINDER FOR LONG TERM DATA PRESERVATION

Abstract

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.

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Beruti, Vincenzo; Giaretta, David; Conway, Esther; Forcada, M.Eugenia; Albani, Mirko

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paper

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GPLv3

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