Who are we? Team and Partnerships

A number of people have contributed and are still contributing to the conceptualisation, design, development and integration of the planning tool.

The core team in Vienna

Christoph Becker is the Lead Architect of PLATO. In 2010 he completed his PhD thesis in computer science entitled "Trustworthy Preservation Planning". Currently he is leading the sub-project Scalable Planning and Watch of the new FP7-funded project SCAPE.
For more information please visit his website.

Markus Hamm is involved in the core development and particularly focussed on decision factor analysis.
For more information please visit his website.

Michael Kraxner is involved in the core development and particularly focussed on plan representation, migration services and registry integration.
For more information please visit his website.

Markus Plangg is involved in the core development and particularly focussed on visualisation, automated experimentation and Taverna workflows.
For more information please visit his website.

Petar Petrov is involved in the core development and particularly focussed on collection anaysis.
For more information please visit his website.

Hannes Kulovits was involved in core development and design, case studies and training events.
Currently he is leading the operational deployment of the planning tool into the Austrian State Archive's production-level archival system.
For more information please visit his website.

Prof. Andreas Rauber acts as Senior Advisor to the core team.
For more information please visit his website.

Further contributions come from the team in Vienna, primarily from Mark Guttenbrunner, Stephan Strodl, Thomas Lidy and Florian Motlik.

Partnerships and integrated tools

Plato is integrating and using tools and services from a variety of sources.
Our documentation page contains several papers explaining the challenges addressed by the incorporation of these components.

The SCAPE Project

We are now working on the SCAPE project which will run until 2014. Among the key expected results of SCAPE is an automated component that brings together repository operations and policies with content, action components, measures, and automated watch to provide a traceable lifecycle of operational planning. The automated planning component will build on the planning tool Plato and will substantially enhance its capabilities in terms of automation and scalability.
In general the SCAPE project will enhance the state of the art of digital preservation in three ways: by developing infrastructure and tools for scalable preservation actions; by providing a framework for automated, quality-assured preservation workflows and by integrating these components with a policy-based preservation planning and watch system. These concrete project results will be validated within three large-scale Testbeds from diverse application areas: Digital Repositories from the library community, Web Content from the web archiving community, and Research Data Sets from the scientific community. Each Testbed has been selected because it highlights unique challenges. SCAPE will develop scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform that orchestrates semi-automated workflows for large-scale, heterogeneous collections of complex digital objects.
The partners of this project are: To find out more about the SCAPE Project please visit www.scape-project.eu.

The Planets Project

Plato was one of the key results of the European project PLANETS.
Planets, Preservation and Long-term Access through Networked Services, was a four-year project co-funded by the European Union under the Sixth Framework Programme to address core digital preservation challenges. The primary goal for Planets was to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to our digital cultural and scientific assets. Planets started on 1st June 2006 and ended on May 31 2010. The strong Planets consortium brings together expertise across Europe from national libraries and archives, leading research universities and technology companies. Coordinated by the British Library, the partners are: A follow-on organisation called the Open Planets Foundation (OPF) has been founded. OPF is a not-for-profit company, registered in the UK. To find out more about the OPF and how to join, please visit www.openplanetsfoundation.org.