Preserving digital Memories

Today, I was talking with my friend Imma , she is library management specialist. I was asking her views regarding digital document preservation. She told me that text document are preserved as pdf and visibility is difficult if the file size is large.

This is a hot issue in the semantic web community, how can we preserve the information. For example , dynamic information is very difficult to preserve( satelight picture or audio information ).

This problem is not only semantic web domain but also it covers all the domain. For example, geographic information , natural pictures, videos etc.

The previously, people took picture by analog camera ;developed the pictures and preserve it in the album. But now, we take lots of pictures with digital camera; how many pictures we preserve it. From my experience, I have lost lot of pictures due to my hard disk crash. I will never get those pictures again. Since, I could not back to the time.

Also, people feel good when they remember childhood memory. But, some people can not remember all the things.

Once I asked one researcher from UK about this. Her vision was an electro magnetic chip that will help to remember things. Do we think , it is enough?

Ancient age, People wrote inforamtion in the stone. Professor Kurodo says"Archiving the mountains of digitalised culture heritage we have amassed for the future is paramount"

There are lots initiative taken now the days:
Recently yahoo announced that they will help digitise 18,000 works of American literature plus material from national and European archieves. That will include books, speeches, audio, video and music.

News channel , BBC also maintains archieve
Ref: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/

University of Trento and Trento city lunched new project "LiveMemory". The main theme of the project is to preserve the city information.

The main problem of preservation is format. There is no unique format for a picture , video, audio or text . Another problem is file size. There are some people offering to put your information or files in the online but I think it is not secured.


According to my views, we can do following things:

• Everybody should agree about the unique format. Example W3 for RDF, OWL, XML
  
• We should start the campaign about "Losing Information in Every Second"through the popular search engines.
• Build an International forum for Digital Information(Pictures forum , Document forum etc)
• Make a digital repository for every city.
  

Intially, It will be very expensive but we should not give up. I am sure that we will invent a small chip that will store a large quatity of information.