CHRONOPOLIS - federated digital preservation across time and space

There is a critical need to organize, preserve, and make accessible the increasing number of digital holdings that represent intellectual capital. This intellectual capital contains scientific records that are the basis for current research, future scientific advances, and education source materials for use by the public, educators, scientists and engineers now and for the foreseeable future. Chronopolis is a proposed model facility that enables long term support of irreplaceable and important national data collections, ensuring that: 1) standard reference datasets remain available to provide critical science reference material; 2) collections can expand and evolve over time, as well as weather evolution in the underlying technologies; and 3) preservation "of last resort" is available for critical disciplinary and interdisciplinary digital resources at risk of being lost.