What is Plato?

Digital content is short-lived, yet may prove to have value in the future. How can we keep it alive?
Finding the right action to enable future access to digital content in a transparent way is the task of Plato.

The mission of digital preservation is to ensure continued, authentic long-term access to digital objects in a usable form for specific user communities. This requires preservation actions to be carried out when the original environment of digital objects is unavailable. A variety of preservation actions exist, but each shows specific peculiarities, and a variety of factors influence the decision.

The mission of preservation planning is to ensure authentic future access for a specific set of objects and designated communities by defining the actions needed to preserve it.

The planning tool Plato is a decision support tool that implements a solid preservation planning process and integrates services for content characterisation, preservation action and automatic object comparison in a service-oriented architecture to provide maximum support for preservation planning endeavours.

What's new?

May 2015: Highly Commended Paper of 2014

We are happy to announce that our paper Scalable Decision Support for Digital Preservation was selected as a Highly Commended Paper of 214

January 2015: Two journal papers are out

Our two journal papers which explain the whole scalable preservation life-cycle were published and are available online.

Scalable Decision Support for Digital Preservation
Christoph Becker, Luis Faria and Kresimir Duretec.
OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, Vol. 30 Iss: 4, pp.249 - 284, 2014

Scalable Decision Support for Digital Preservation: An Assessment
Christoph Becker, Luis Faria and Kresimir Duretec.
OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, Vol. 31 Iss: 1, pp.11 - 34, 2015

September 2014: Best Demonstration at Digital Libraries 2014

The SCAPE PW Lifecycle

We are happy to announce that The SCAPE preservation lifecycle was awarded Best Demonstration at Digital Libraries 2014.

September 2014: SCAPE Workshop at Digital Libraries 2014

SCAPE logo

In addition to the Demo at Digital Libraries 2014, Plato is part of the workshop Digital Preservation Sustainability On The EU Policy Level jointly organised by APARSEN and SCAPE. The workshop takes place in connection with Digital Libraries 2014 on 8th September 2014 in London.

The main objective of the workshop is to provide an overview of solutions to challenges within Digital Preservation Sustainability developed by current and past Digital Preservation research projects. The event brings together various EU projects/initiatives to present their solutions and approaches, and to find synergies between them. A special focus will lie on SCAPE (Scalable Preservation Environments), which will have its final project presentation at this event.

To register and for further information visit the registration page. It is not necessary to register for the DL2014 conference in order to attend. The workshop is free of charge.

September 2014: Plato at Digital Libraries 2014

DL 2014 logo

Plato will be presented as part of The SCAPE preservation lifecycle at Digital Libraries 2014, the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries and the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries Conference series. The event will be held on September 8th-12th 2014 in London.

The conference marks the 18th event in the TPDL conference series, and the 14th of JCDL. The health and vigour of both communities will be combined in this year's joint programme.

Whatever your interests in the broadly interpreted domain of digital libraries: user research, system architectures, collection policies, or specialist domains such as digital humanities, preservation or scholarship, we look forward to your submission of new research and your attendance in September 2014.

For further information check out Digital Libraries 2014, to register visit the City's registration page.

June 2014: Digital Preservation Lifecycle Tutorial

ELPUB 2014 logo

Plato will be part of the tutorial Digital Preservation Lifecycle: from challenges to solutions at the 18th International Conference on Electronic Publishing on June 18, 2014 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

This tutorial will consist of two parts, providing first an introduction to digital preservation, followed by an in-depth discussion of the preservation life cycle and tool support to manage it.

For further information check out Tutorial: Digital Preservation Lifecycle: from challenges to solutions.

March 2014: Plato 4.4 released

We are pleased to announce the release of Plato 4.4, including:

  • Read-only mode for public plans
  • Integration of Components
  • Execution of characterisation and quality assurance components
  • Generation of preservation action plan templates including migration components
  • Deployment of plans using Plan Management API
  • Creation of monitoring conditions (Quality Level Descriptions and triggers for Scout)

Feedback

Did you encounter any bugs or do you have any comments? Please submit bug reports and comments using the integrated feedback link in Plato, or send us an email.

This software is licensed under Apache version 2.0 or later. The source code of Plato 4 is available on github.