POCOS project

POCOS (Preservation of Complex Objects Symposia) is a JISC-funded project centered around three international symposia at locations across the United Kingdom and taking place during 2011-2012. Electronic books will be published on each seminar topic.
Objectives
The POCOS project delivers a series of three symposia at locations across the United Kingdom at which global thought-leaders in research into the Digital Preservation of Complex Objects share and thereby extend the body of knowledge on this topic. Each seminar addresses a specific domain:
# Visualisations and Simulations
# Digital Art
# Games and Virtual Worlds
The rationale behind this is to have distinctive cases which serve both to illustrate the differences across various application domains, and crystallise common ground, approaches and techniques for the preservation of complex objects.
The seminars bring together researchers and practitioners and provide a setting to present the state-of-the-art and discuss future work.
Electronic books published on each seminar topic will make available to the wider community the talks and discussions during the events. Links to the books will be provided when they are available.
Preceding Work
Complex objects are a special case for digital preservation. In 2003 the report "Invest to Save" of the DELOS working group on Digital Preservation suggested a research agenda which includes 'Managing Complex and Dynamic Digital Entities'. More recent research addressed various aspects of preservation of complex objects, e.g. how to preserve multimedia objects, or how to use Fedora architectures in the case of complex objects. Complex objects have been addressed previously in projects such as Planets and KEEP.
However, the research and practitioner community now needs to go beyond fragmented work to synthesise the available knowledge and expand it to full-fledged methodological approaches and practical solutions. The recent discussion on future research priorities in digital preservation organised by the European Commission also highlighted this domain as one in need of future work.
Consortium
University of Portsmouth (Coordinator)
Dr. David Anderson and Dr. Janet Delve from The School of Creative Technologies coordinate the overall project. Their team is also actively involved in work on the KEEP Project and in the JISC-funded Digital Preservation Console project.
The British Library (Project manager)
Clive Billenness is co-coordinator of POCOS. The British Library coordinated the Planets project and is a Founder Member of the Open Planets Foundation (OPF).
University of Glasgow
Dr. Leo Konstantelos of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute is the local organizer for the second POCOS symposium on Digital Art, 18-19 October 2011, Glasgow.
King’s College London
Drew Baker of the King's Visualisation Lab was the local organizer for the first POCOS symposium on Visualisations and Simulations, 16-17 June 2011, London.
Joguin SAS
Sonia Sefi of Joguin SAS, is the local organizer for the final POCOS symposium on Games and Virtual Worlds, February 2011, Cardiff.
Symposia
Visualisations and Simulations
Communities working on scientific visualisations and simulations are becoming more aware of the need to preserve; The London Charter for the Computer-Based Visualisation of Cultural Heritage addresses the importance of preservation. Work to offer practical solutions however still needs to be done. The first POCOS symposium was held on 16-17 June 2011 in London, hosted by the King's Visualisation Lab. Participants came from Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and the United States.
The symposium featured a keynote presentation by Professor John Clarke, University of Texas and talks by:
* Kenton McHenry, NCSA University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;
* Jenny Mitcham, The Archaeology Data Service;
* Professor Richard Beacham, King's College London;
* Dr. Hugh Denard, King's College London.
Three Breakout Sessions were organised:
# Data security (moderated by Andrew Ball, Former head of IT Audit, The Audit Commission)
# Preservation strategies (moderated by William Kilbride, The Digital Preservation Coalition)
# Legal issues of preservation (moderated by David Anderson, The University of Portsmouth)
An open forum for practical solutions was hosted by Daniël Pletinckx who presented an introductory talk on Visual Dimension and V_Must.
A book summarising talks and discussions is currently under preparation.
Digital Art
The second POCOS symposium will be held in October 2011 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Gaming Environments and Virtual Worlds
The third POCOS symposium will be held in February 2012 in Cardiff, Wales.
Wider Outreach and Media Coverage
The work of POCOS has already sparked wider discussions on preservation issues; for instance, the preservation of digital art was addressed in an article in The Observer in May 2011 which also mentioned the forthcoming symposia. The preservation of visualisations and simulations featured in the Artful Science, C&EN Blog at around the same time.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu