Introduction
What is Plato?
The fast changes of technologies in today's information landscape have considerably shortened the lifespan of digital objects. Digital preservation has become a pressing challenge. Different strategies such as migration and emulation have been proposed; however, the decision for a specific tool e.g. for format migration or an emulator is very complex. The process of evaluating potential solutions against specific requirements and building a plan for preserving a given set of objects is called preservation planning. So far, it is a mainly manual, sometimes ad-hoc process with little or no tool support. 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.
This software is licensed under the CC-GNU LGPL version 2.1 or later. We are going put the source code of Plato on sourceforge in the near future. In the meantime please do not hesitate to contact us at plato@ifs.tuwien.ac.at to receive a copy of the source code.
Plato 2.1 has been released now!
Click here to enter Plato.
What's new?
Plato 2.1 has been released in November 2009, two years after the first public release of Plato. The complete history of releases is given on the history page (upper right).
The main new features of this release are:- Objective tree editors and knowledge base. We have redesigned the user interface for the objective trees and come up with a much easier to use and much faster editor for the knowledge base.
- Jhove. We have integrated JHove, including a neat visual side-by-side comparison feature for migrated sample objects to support visual evaluation.
- Quality-aware migration services We have made a prototype registry containing quality-aware migration services available through Plato, featuring automated evaluation of some of the requirements. These migration service measure quality and performance (time and memory) and provide this information together with the result. Corresponding publications about this technology can be found on the documentation page.
- Navigation structure. We have introduced a home screen providing a central point of entry.
- Executable preservation plan. Plato 2.1 creates an executable preservation plan in XML, which can be run in the Planets workflow execution engine.
- Service Integration. Updated access to Planets migration services.
- Scalability. Previously, it was not feasible to upload large sample objects to create a preservation plan, due to memory limitations. We have worked on this issue and are now supporting sample objects sets up to (roughly) 200MB per plan.
- Policy definition. You can now define your policies once and each preservation plan you create will be using these policies.
Feedback and browser compatibility
Did you encounter any bugs? In this case, please submit bug reports and comments on our GForge homepage.
For information regarding browser compatibility and known issues, please click here.
