ARCHANGEL - Trusted Archives of Digital Public Records

ARCHANGEL的目标是通过设计、开发和试验变革性的新分布式账本技术（DLT）来确保数字档案的长期可持续性，以促进可访问性并确保内容的完整性，同时通过商品化和开放获取的新型商业模式最大限度地发挥其影响。档案和记忆机构（AMIs）是后代感知今天的镜头；它们构成了一个国家权威的经济、社会和文化记忆。例如，国家档案馆（bbbb15拍字节）是世界上最大和最古老的ami之一，负责保存英国政府的数字记录，例如部长们做出的关键决定和收到的建议。这些信息有些是公开的，有些几十年来一直保密。ami是建立在公众信任、中立和完全可信的原则之上的；ami的不变性和完整性对于保持其客观性至关重要。然而，在世界历史上，这种客观性受到损害的例子比比皆是，例如，在政治动荡时期，实物记录被删除。当今的数字时代在数据保护方面给ami带来了新的社会技术挑战。数字公共记录是无形的，因此很容易删除或修改，而修改不一定会被发现。事实上，在某些情况下，必须修改记录，以确保它们在格式变化时仍然可以访问，并且数据的管理还伴随着需要维护相关代码以呈现该数据的需要，通常需要几十年。应该如何做出迁移或维护优先级的决定，或者如何审核？从现在起一百年后，移民会导致小的保真度损失，这意味着什么？公众如何确保数字内容在发布时与原始内容基本没有改变？现有的档案工作不足以应对这些问题，而且迫切需要进行改革，以跟上我们向日益数字化的社会转型的步伐，从而为子孙后代确保知识的完整性和公正性。ARCHANGEL是一项为期18个月的社会技术可行性研究，与最终用户共同创建和评估一种新型原型DLT服务，以确定档案实践、可持续模式和公众态度如何在可信的去中心化技术的存在下发展，以证明内容的完整性并确保对数字公共档案的开放访问。从技术角度来看，ARCHANGEL将利用尖端的机器学习，在经过许可的DLT中收集来自数字化物理和原生数字内容的强大数字签名。用于呈现内容并验证其来源和完整性的签名和编程代码都将在DLT中进行编码。将使用跨AMI模型在创建和消费点探索维持DLT的新商业模式，例如通过贡献的努力（工作证明），其中单个DLT由多个AMI，跨学科和国家贡献，从而降低其操作AMI的档案扭曲风险。影响不仅限于传统的ami，还包括任何数字公共档案：大学研究数据存储库（与DOI链接）；更好地管理跨国公司的企业记忆（例如，财务/监管合规，管理科技公司的现有技术记录）。为了进行这个冒险和雄心勃勃的项目，我们已经形成了一个战略性的多学科合作伙伴关系，联合了一个世界领先的多模态信号处理小组（CVSSP），萨里商学院的数字经济中心（CODE），以及包括国家档案馆和蒂姆·伯纳斯·李的开放数据研究所（ODI）在内的AMI利益相关者联盟。基础设施将与DLT平台提供商Guardtime一起开发，并通过Methods Digital加速影响。

The aim of ARCHANGEL is to ensure the long-term sustainability of digital archives though the design, development and trialling of transformational new distributed ledger technology (DLT) to promote accessibility and ensure integrity of content, whilst maximising its impact through novel business models for commodification and open access.Archives and Memory Institutions (AMIs) are the lens through which future generations will perceive today; they form the authoritative economic, social and cultural memory of a nation. For example, The National Archives (>15 petabytes) is one of the world's largest and oldest AMIs responsible for preserving the digital record of the UK Government e.g. key decisions made by Ministers and advice received. Some of this information is made open, some kept closed for decades. AMIs are founded upon the principle of public trust, of being neutral and completely trustworthy; the immutability and integrity of AMIs are essential to maintaining their objectivity. Yet world history is littered with examples where this objectivity has been compromised e.g. through expunging of physical records during times of political unrest. Today's digital age presents new socio-technical challenges to AMIs around safeguarding of data. Digital public records are intangible and so easy to remove or modify without that modification necessarily being detectable. Indeed in some cases records have to be modified to ensure their continued accessibility as formats change and the curation of data is also accompanied by the need to maintain associated code to render that data for presentation, often across decades. How should decisions over migration or prioritisation of maintenance be taken, or audited? What are the implications of migrations resulting in minor losses of fidelity one hundred years from now? How can the public be sure that digital content when released is fundamentally unaltered from the original? Existing archival practice is ill-equipped to respond to such issues, and is in urgent need of disruption to keep pace with our transformation into an increasingly digital society, so ensuring the integrity and impartiality of knowledge for future generations.ARCHANGEL is a 18 month socio-technical feasibility study co-creating and evaluating a novel prototype DLT service with end-users to determine how archival practices, sustainable models and public attitudes could evolve in the presence of a trusted decentralised technology to prove content integrity and ensure open access to digital public archives. From a technological standpoint, ARCHANGEL will leverage cutting-edge machine learning to collect robust digital signatures derived from digitised physical, and born-digital content, within a permissioned DLT. Both signatures and programmatic code to render content and verify its provenance and integrity will be encoded within the DLT. Novel business models for sustaining the DLT e.g. via contributed effort (proof of work) will be explored at the points of creation and consumption using a cross-AMI model in which a single DLT is contributed to by multiple AMIs, across disciplines and nations, mitigating risk of archive distortion by its operating AMI. Impact is not limited to traditional AMIs, but any digital public archive: University research data repositories (linked to DOI); better management of corporate memory in multi-nationals (e.g. financial/regulatory compliance, managing records of prior art in tech companies).To undertake this adventurous and ambitious project we have formed a strategic multi-disciplinary partnership uniting a world-leading group in multi-modal signal processing (CVSSP), the Centre for the Digital Economy (CODE) within Surrey Business School, and a consortium of AMI stakeholders including The National Archives and Tim Berners-Lee's Open Data Institute (ODI). The infrastructure will be developed with DLT platform provider Guardtime, and impact accelerated via Methods Digital.