I should have mentioned this yesterday, but was in Strasbourg for European Parliament debates and Jose Manuel Barrosso’s State of the Union address.
We have great news: EU funded open source software can now be downloaded to preserve digital data for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.
Download the CASPAR software here
Until now mountains of data such as official records, museum archives and scientific results has been unreadable or at risk of loss because newer technologies could not read it or make it understood to current users.
If you’re like me and have ever lost access to family photos or old documents, you will know the frustration of dealing with incompatible technologies. So it’s very exciting to know we can beat this problem now, and that everyone can have access to the solution.
Beyond the personal sphere this could have a huge impact in areas like astronomy, quantum physics or climatology. Specialists in these fields rely on the quantitative analysis of large data sets over a large period of time. For example in measuring human influence on global warming. It would be a disaster for humanity to lose access to this data and the knowledge that can be gained from it.
Now much of the drama that used to exist around moving data from magnetic tapes to saving it on disks and then in the computing cloud on huge servers is gone.
Further information on CASPAR here.
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