Abstract
In order to keep digital objects for an indefinite period of time, one needs a very contrived archiving system. One challenge is to sustain the accessibility of document formats that are becoming obsolete, another is to guarantee their authenticity. The Universal Virtual Computer (UVC) is a simple yet powerful approach to preserve digital objects on a very long-term scale. Its main attraction is that documents do not have to be processed and transformed during their whole archive lifetime. In contrast, when using the migration approach, all documents have to be processed in regular intervals. This is not only time-consuming; also, after a number of migration steps a document’s authenticity is seriously threatened. UVC does not share these problems. With UVC, the main effort occurs before ingest time: rendering software for interpreting documents of a given format on UVC must be developed and archived. The effort spent in the development of the rendering software will determine the degree of authenticity. In order to access archived objects, an implementation of UVC must be available. The focus of this paper is on implementing UVC. So far, only proof-of-concept implementations of UVC were available. We have gained practical experience by implementing UVC on different platforms based on a collection of vintage, but still fully working supercomputers. These efforts have led to an improved specification of the UVC, which simplifies implementation even more.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bayer, R., McCreight, E.: Organization and maintenance of large ordered indices. In: ACM SIGFIDET, pp. 107–141. ACM, New York (1970)
Borghoff, U.M., Rödig, P., Scheffczyk, J., Schmitz, L.: Long-Term Preservation of Digital Documents: Principles and Practices. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Ceruzzi, P.E.: A History of Modern Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge (2003)
Control Data Corporation: FORTRAN Extended Version 4, Reference Manual, Rev. J, Sunnyvale, California (1983)
Gladney, H.M., Lorie, R.A.: Trustworthy 100-Year Digital Objects: Durable Encoding for When It’s Too Late to Ask. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 23(3), 299–324 (2005)
Krebs, N., Rönnau, S., Borghoff, U.M.: Fostering the Universal Virtual Computer as Long-Term Preservation Platform. In: ECBS 2011, pp. 105–110 (2011)
Lorie, R.A.: Long term preservation of digital information. In: JCDL 2001, pp. 346–352. ACM, New York (2001)
Lorie, R.A.: The UVC: A Method for Preserving Digital Documents: Proof of Concept. Technical report, IBM and Koninklijke Bibliotheek (2002)
Lorie, R.A., van Diessen, R.J.: UVC: A universal virtual computer for long-term preservation of digital information. Technical report, IBM Res. rep. RJ 10338 (2005)
Oltmans, E., van Wijngaarden, H.: Digital preservation in practice: the e-Depot at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. VINE 32(6), 21–26 (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Krebs, N., Schmitz, L., Borghoff, U.M. (2012). Implementing the Universal Virtual Computer. In: Moreno-Díaz, R., Pichler, F., Quesada-Arencibia, A. (eds) Computer Aided Systems Theory – EUROCAST 2011. EUROCAST 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6927. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27549-4_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27549-4_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-27548-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27549-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)