Epimenides: An information system offering automated reasoning for the needs of digital preservation

Abstract

Epimenides is a system that can be used in the context of digital archives and digital libraries for helping archivists in checking whether the archived digital artifacts remain intelligible and functional, and in identifying the consequences of probable losses. A distinctive feature of Epimenides is that it can model also converters and emulators, and the adopted modelling approach enables the automatic reasoning needed for reducing the human effort required for checking whether a task can be performed over a digital object (or digital collection in general).