Introduction

Metadata is information about an object that is needed in order to manage that object. Preservation metadata (Dappert and Enders, 2010) for computing environments is the information that is needed in order to redeploy computing environments successfully in the future. Metadata for digital objects’computing environments constitutes essential representation information that is needed in order to be able to use digital objects and to make them understandable in the future. This is why metadata about computing environments must be preserved together with the digital objects as part of their core metadata. Furthermore, software components themselves may be the primary objects of preservation, and require a metadata description. Computer games can take either of these two roles.

Digital objects and the computing environments in which they function are continuously under threat of becoming unusable through deterioration, obsolescence or inadvertent damage during form or environment shifting. Computing environment preservation can happen, for example, through hardware and software preservation, emulation, reconstruction or porting to new environments. Depending on the nature of the computing environment, the nature of threats, the preservation approach and the community that wants to redeploy the computing environment, different metadata is needed.

The TIMBUS project (TIMBUS project, 2012), a three-year EU co-funded project, addresses the challenge of long-term digital preservation for business processes and services. This entails the preservation of computing environments. It entails definition of metadata needed to access processes and their computing environments in the long run. This chapter introduces the TIMBUS approach, illustrates how it can be applied to the preservation of computing environments and describes other efforts for defining metadata for preserving relevant aspects of computing environments. TIMBUS goes beyond the preservation of computer games and virtual worlds, but it is easy to see how the same approach can be used for them.

The TIMBUS project

The EU co-funded TIMBUS project addresses the challenge of digital preservation of business processes and services to ensure their long-term continued access. TIMBUS analyses and recommends which aspects of a business process should be preserved and how to preserve them. It delivers methodologies and tools to capture and formalize business processes on both technical and organizational levels. This includes the software and hardware infrastructures underlying these business processes and dependencies on third-party services and information.