ESA USE CASES IN LONG TERM DATA PRESERVATION: Paper - iPRES 2012 - Digital Curation Institute, iSchool, Toronto

Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) aims at ensuring the intelligibility of digital information at any given time in the near or distant future. LTDP has to address changes that inevitably occur in hardware or software, in the organisational or legal environment, as well as in the designated community, i.e. the people that will use the preserved information. A preservation data manages communication from the past while communicating with the future. Information generated in the past is sent into the future by the current preservation data. European Space Agency (ESA) has a crucial and unique role in this mission, because it maintains in its archives long time series of Earth Observation (EO) data. In order to ensure to future generations data use and accessibility of this cultural heritage is needed to define a systematic approach, accompanied by different use cases