User:Phillipviana/sandbox/SNIA Long-term Retention TWG

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Long-term Retention TWG is the part of the organization focused on the long-term preservation of digital data.

History
SNIA conducted a survey in 2007 as part of its "100 year archive task force". According to the results of the survey, 81% of the companies with data preservation requirements require data to be preserved for more than 50 years. In 2008 the Long-term Retention Technical Workgroup was created.

Charter
The Long Term Retention (LTR) TWG will ensure that SNIA plays a full part in addressing the "grand technical challenges" of long term digital information retention & preservation, namely both physical ("bit") and logical preservation.

The TWG will generate reference architectures, create new technical definitions for formats, interfaces and services, and author educational materials. The group will be working to ensure that digital information can be efficiently and effectively preserved for many decades, even when devices are constantly being replaced, new technologies, applications and formats are introduced, consumers (designated communities) often change, and so on.

The TWG's Program of Work is derived from the results of the 100 Year Archive Requirements Survey completed in 2007. Customer feedback from that survey indicated a widespread need to preserve information for a period greater than 15 years, but also significant concern that today the ability to correctly read and interpret information becomes highly at risk beyond that point. The TWG also coordinates with other TWGs, especially the Cloud TWG and the Security TWG.

The TWG will create Technical Work that will follow the SNIA Architecture Track.

The TWG will work with the Strategic Alliances Committee to ensure that SNIA becomes the focal point for collaboration between storage device and network suppliers/users, and professional groups concerned with information preservation. By bringing together multiple disciplines that do not currently have a venue for joint technical activity, the LTR TWG will ensure the maximal reuse of existing definitions and processes, and the widest possible applicability of any new definitions and standards.

SIRF
Self-contained Information Retention Format (SIRF) is a data preservation format designed by the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA), which is an association of suppliers and consumers of computer storage.

SIRF is a logical container format for the storage subsystem appropriate for the long-term storage of digital information. It is intended for a logical or physical storage area considered as a unit (storage container). For example, a storage container may comprise a mountable data storage unit, a file system, a tape, a block device, a stream device, an object store, a data bucket in a cloud storage. SIRF is self-describing; namely it can be interpreted by different systems and in different points in time. SIRF is also self-contained; namely, all data needed for the preservation objects' interpretation is contained in the container. The metaphor we use is a closed bottle that includes all the information needed to understand the bottle's contents at a future point in time.

SIRF leverages the knowledge of the archival profession and helps archivists remain comfortable with the digital domain. Generally, archivists group physical items into collections and store them in a physical container (e.g. a file folder or an archival box of standard dimensions), and that container will be labeled with some "finding aid" that gives the name and location of the collection, its size, and an overview of its contents. SIRF is the digital equivalent to the physical container - the archival box or file folder - that defines a collection of preservation objects, and that can be labeled with standard information in a defined format to allow retrieval when needed.

OpenSIRF
OpenSIRF is a free, open-source implementation of the SIRF format under the MIT License written in Java. OpenSIRF encompasses a core component (opensirf-core), which contains the model classes with all the elements that belong to the SIRF format, and a REST component (opensirf-jaxrs), which defines a RESTful API to manipulate the SIRF catalog and its associated objects. Because of the RESTful API, OpenSIRF is compatible and can be easily integrated with user interfaces (e.g. websites) and web services. OpenSIRF is currently under development and can be found on GitHub.