Vienna University of Technology
 Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems
Information & Software Engineering Group

[DigitalPreservation @ IFS]

Christoph Becker

Contact

Background

Projects

Awards

Publications

Teaching

Activities

Selected talks 

Contact

Dr. Christoph Becker

Vienna University of Technology
Institute of Software Technology and
Interactive Systems
Information and Software Engineering Group

Room: HE 04 38

Favoritenstrasse 9-11/188/2
A-1040 Wien
Austria

email: becker@domain
(domain = ifs.tuwien.ac.at)

phone: +43 1 58801 - 18818
fax: +43 1 58801 - 18899

   Photo of Christoph Becker

Dr. Christoph Becker is Senior Researcher at the Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology and at Secure Business Austria. Since 1998 he has worked as an independent IT consultant and software architect on a range of IT projects in different sectors. He finished his doctoral degree in computer science in 2010 after graduating with an MSc in Economics and Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology in 2007 and with an MSc and BSc in Computer Science in 2006 and 2004 respectively. He is member of ACM, IEEE and ASIST and has been involved in the European research projects DELOS, PLANETS, DPE, and SHAMAN. Currently he is leading the sub-project Scalable Planning and Watch of the new FP7-funded project SCAPE.
Topics of interest include requirements analysis and system design; information management, specifically digital preservation; decision analysis; software engineering; information systems; and others.

 

Background

  • 2010-2011: Visiting researcher at INESC-ID, IST Lisbon
  • 2006-2010: PhD student and Project Assistant at TU Vienna's Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Information and Software Engineering Group doing research on Digital Preservation
  • Master of Science in Economics and Computer Science (Magisterstudium Wirtschaftsinformatik),
    Vienna University of Technology, March 2006 - May 2007.
  • Master of Science in Computer Science (Diplomstudium),
    Vienna University of Technology, March 2004 - March 2006.
  • Bachelor of Computer Science (Bakkalaureatsstudium),
    Vienna University of Technology, October 1999 - March 2004.
  • since 1998: self-employed and employed work in IT projects in Salzburg and Vienna
  
 

Projects and Activities
  • SCAPE
    SCALable Preservation Environments
    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. (2011-2014)
 
  • APARSEN
    Alliance Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe Network     (FP7 Network of Excellence)
    APARSEN is a new Network of Excellence that aims to bring together an extremely diverse set of practitioner organisations and researchers in order to bring coherence, cohesion and continuity to research into barriers to the long-term accessibility and usability of digital information and data, exploiting our diversity by building a long-lived Virtual Centre of Digital Preservation Excellence. (2011-2014)
 
  • SHAMAN
    Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent Archiving
    The aim of SHAMAN is to develop the framework for the next generation of long term (more than one century) digital preservation systems and tools. This includes the definition of a theory of preservation that integrates the analysis, ingestion, management, access to and reuse of information objects across distributed repositories. The data preservation capabilities offered will secure the authenticity and integrity of data objects over time.
 
  • Local Organiser of IPRES 2010
    The Austrian National Library and the Technical University of Vienna were pleased to host the International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects (iPRES 2010) in Vienna in September 2010. iPRES 2010 was the seventh in the series of annual international conferences that bring together researchers and practitioners from around the world to explore the latest trends, innovations, and practices in preserving our digital heritage.
 
  • PLANETS
    (Permanent Long-term Access through Networked Services)
    The Planets project brings together European National Libraries and Archives, leading research institutions, and technology companies to address the challenge of preserving access to digital cultural and scientific knowledge. The objective of PLANETS is to develop systems and tools which will support the accessibility and use of digital cultural and scientific resources, specifically through the development of novel concepts, techniques and tools to preserve the availability of digital resources over time.
 
    Plato: The Planets Preservation Planning Tool
    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.
 
  • Digital Preservation Europe (DPE)
    Electronic resources are a central part of our cultural and intellectual heritage; but this material is at risk. Digital memory needs constant management, using new techniques and processes, to contain such risks as technological obsolescence. Risk begins before the digital record is created and continues for as long as the digital object needs to be retained. Digital preservation is too big an issue for individual institutions or even sectors to address independently. Concerted action at both national and international level is required. DigitalPreservationEurope facilitates pooling of the complementary expertise that exists across the academic research, cultural, public administration, and industry sectors in Europe.
  
  • DELOS EU Network of Excellence
    DELOS is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries, partially funded by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). The main objective of DELOS is to coordinate a joint programme of activities of the major European teams working in digital library related areas.

    Digital Preservation Cluster (WP 6)
    Integrated research in the preservation cluster will provide the methodological framework and theory for ensuring that digital libraries research addresses preservation issues and digital libraries incorporate preservation elements in their designs.
 
  • IFS Digital Preservation Group
    The increasing amount of digital material contains essential parts of our cultural and intellectual heritage. With the rapid technological changes, the preservation of the digital information is turning into one of the most pressing challenges to ensure the survival of our digital artefacts. The challenge is to keep electronic data accessible, viewable and usable for the future.
    Our digital preservation group investigates the selection of preservation strategies to make informed and accountable decisions. The research covers a wide range of application such as e-government records, interactive art, electronic publications, photography, computer games, or web archiving. Preservation Requirements Analysis and Specification is central to this approach. Requirements are elicited and organised in a tree structure called objective tree. Current research aims at automating the planning procedure and introducing software for supporting the decision process. To achieve this, we are integrating distributed services for preservation action and characterisation and developing best-practice models.
    Apart from requirements for institutional settings, Personal Archiving, serving the preservation needs of private users and small offices, is gaining importance.
    We are furthermore working towards analysing and concretising the reference model for an Open Archival Information System.
    Another stronghold of digital preservation research is Web Archiving, where we are active in research on building national web archives as well as analysis and mining of web archive data.
    Finally, we deliver training, wherein we are working towards better education possibilities in related fields. This includes the development of curricula for digital preservation at universities as well as continuing education in terms of workshops and seminars for professionals.
   
  • Langfristige Archivierung digitaler Fotografien (in German)
    Diese 2007 durchgeführte Studie beleuchtet die Problemstellungen und Anforderungen bei der Langzeitarchivierung digitaler Fotografien. Wir bieten eine kurze Zusammenfassung sowie den vollständigen Text der Studie zum Download.
   
     

Awards

  • Thesis is shortlisted for Informatics Thesis Award:
    My PhD thesis was selected and shortlisted for the GI-Dissertationspreis 2010.
  • Thesis wins Information Science award: VFI-Förderungspreis 2010.
    My PhD thesis won the first prize in the 2010 award of the Verein zur Förderung der Informationswissenschaft (Assocation for the Advancement of Information Sciences).
    The jury said: "Die Dis­ser­tation von Herrn Becker stellt eine besonders gründliche Ana­lyse des Planungs­pro­zes­ses für die Langzeit­archi­vierung digitaler Objekte einschliesslich eines systematischen Ansatzes zur Pla­nung sowie der Erstellung eines inzwischen bereits in der Praxis erprobten Soft­waretools zur Planungs­unterstützung dar."
    Press release (in German)
  • Shortlisted for the Digital Preservation Award 2010.
    Plato has been shortlisted for the prestigious DP award 2010.
    Press release
  • Best Demo Award at ECDL 2008.
    At the European Conference on Digital Libraries 2008, ECDL 2008, the planning tool Plato shared the first prize for the best demonstration of the conference with the search engine Summa.
 
 
 

Publications


  

Teaching

A lot of current topics at can be explored in Praktika, bachelor and master theses etc... additional topics upon request, further suggestions welcome. Please contact me for an appointment if you are interested! Some examples below.
  • Crowd-sourcing and digital preservation
  • Information modelling and model transformation
  • Automated email preservation
  • Modelling and simulation of an archival system
  • Scientific dataset migration
  • XML modelling and transformation
  • XML transcription using semantic technologies
  • Automated test data generation
  • Non-functional requirements and software durability
  • Software quality criteria, automated measurement, component selection
  • Multi-criteria decision making
  • Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)
  • Preservation of complex objects, interactive multimedia and digital art
  • Web engineering, Java Enterprise technologies and frameworks
  • Trustworthy software evaluation
  • Web data extraction for digital preservation
  • Risk assessment of file formats and technology watch for preservation planning
  • Evaluation of natural language translation tools
Lectures: Supervised theses:
  • Markus Hamm: Impact Assessment of Decision Criteria in Multi Criteria Decision Analysis for Digital Preservation. Master thesis, 2011, see also the paper at IPRES2011.
  • Riccardo Gottardi: Complex Digital Object Preservation. Master thesis, 2010.
  • Michael Kraxner: Maintaining a Preservation Plan. Bachelor thesis, 2009.
  • Petar Petrov: Challenges and Opportunities in Personal Health-Care Management: A concept for supporting diabetics. Bachelor thesis, 2009.
  • Mark Guttenbrunner: Digital Preservation of Video Games.
    Master thesis, completed September 2007, see also the paper at IPRES2008.
 

Activities

  • Reviewing: Among others, I have conducted reviews for the following venues.
  • Program Committee member of IPRES 2010 and IPRES 2011
  • Publicity Co-chair of IPRES 2011

Selected talks

  • Preservation Decisions and Governance: An IT Perspective. Invited lecture at the Faculy of Information, University of Toronto, January 2012. [slides]
  • Preservation Planning: which criteria matter, and how can we measure them? Tutorial given at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in Ottawa, Canada, June 2011.
  • Trustworthy Preservation Planning. Invited talk at the Colloquium for the Informatics Thesis Award 2010 at the Leibniz Center for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany. May 2011. [slides]
  • Component selection in Digital Preservation: Preservation Planning as a Decision Problem. Invited talk at IST Lisbon, December 2010.
  • Digital Preservation: Challenges, Solutions, and Approaches to Accountable Planning of Digital Preservation. Tutorial given at the International Conference on Digital Libraries in New Delhi, India, February 2010.
  • Why do we have to plan digital preservation? Presentation at the Planets training event at the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark, June 2009.
  • Planets: Preservation and Long-Term Access through Networked Services. Invited talk at the REBIUN workshop, Murcia, Spain, October 2008
  • Planets: Preservation and Long-Term Access through Networked Services. Presentation at CEBIT 2008
  • Evaluating preservation strategies: Decision support for preservation planning. Invited talk at the Tools and Trends conference at the Royal Library of the Netherlands. The Hague, November 2007
  • Preservation Planning in Planets. Invited talk at the DPC workshop on JPEG2000. British Library, June 2007.
 
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last edited 2011.05.09 by Christoph Becker