Data and Software Preservation for Open Science (DASPOS)

Abstract

Data and Software Preservation for Open Science (DASPOS), represents a first attempt to establish a formal collaboration tying together physicists from the CMS and ATLAS experiments at the LHC and the Tevatron experiments with experts in digital curation, heterogeneous high-throughput storage systems, large-scale computing systems, and grid access and infrastructure. Recently funded by the National Science Foundation, the project is organizing multiple workshops aimed at understanding use cases for data, software, and knowledge preservation in High Energy Physics and other scientific disciplines, including BioInformatics and Astrophysics. The goal of this project is the technical development and specification of an architecture for curating HEP data and software to the point where the repetition of a physics analysis using only the archived data, software, and analysis description is possible. The novelty of this effort is this holistic approach, where not only data but also software and frameworks necessary to use the data are part of the preservation effort, making it true “physics preservation” rather than merely data preservation.