Data Warehouses for the Long-term Preservation of Institutional Electronic Records and Databases

The project explores the application of DW technology to the preservation of complex electronic records. In more detail, the project will study: - properties that the DW must possess, according to the standards already established (like the Open Archives Initiative); - rules of transformation from operational systems into DW, adopting a process-centric but integrated view, which guarantees those properties; - a XML version of the DW, though the DW model is already very simple and thus fulfills the requirement of platform independence required by long-term preservation; - metadata needs, beyond the data in the operational database, to preserve the meaning of the processes, most often just implicit in the data but present in organizational procedures and in software development documentation; - application to the human resources system of a concrete institution, now undergoing an important reorganization; - assessment of the results obtained with the help of external experts.