Using Grid Federations for Digital Preservation

Digital preservation aims at guaranteeing that data or digital objects remain authentic and accessible to users over a long period of time, maintaining their value. Several communities, like biology, medicine, engineering or physics, manage large amounts of scientific information, including large datasets of structured data that matters to preserve, so that it can be used in future research. To achieve long-term digital preservation, it is required to store digital objects reliably, preventing data loss. The data redundancy strategy is required to be able to successfully preserve data. Many of the characteristics required to implement, manage and evolve a preservation environment are already present in existing data grid systems, such as replication and the possibility to federate with other grids in order to share resources. We propose the customization of a data grid platform in order to be able to take advantage of its replication and federation features. In that way, scenarios where federated grids not thought for preservation purposes can be extended to preservation and their spare resources used with that mission.