A new agreement has been signed between PREFORMA and BenchmarkDP, two projects working in the field of digital preservation.
Main objectives of this agreement are:
- to explore how the methodologies and approaches of BenchmarkDP could be useful in PREFORMA in establishing an objective frame of reference for the evaluation of the conformance checkers, and how the practical challenges in PREFORMA can inform the work in BenchmarkDP over the next months;
- to jointly develop and publish specifications for software benchmarks around the PREFORMA focus areas;
- to evaluate the use of BenchmarkDP methods and systems to automatically generate synthetic benchmarking corpora for testing the digital preservation tools developed in PREFORMA, starting from PREFORMA ground truth model;
- to evaluate possible approaches to ensure the sustainability of PREFORMA OS projects, starting from the work done in BenchmarkDP on Software Engineering;
- to monitor the new H2020 calls to identify whether there is the possibility to develop a joint proposal focused on providing memory institutions with useful methodology and tools for benchmarking.
The cooperation between the two project started with the participation of PREFORMA representatives in the benchmarking workshop organised by BenchmarkDP in the framework of IPRES 2015 Conference.
BenchmarkDP (http://benchmark-dp.org/) is an interdisciplinary multi-year research project funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) to develop the first coherent, systematic approach to assess and compare digital preservation processes, systems, and organizational capabilities.
PREFORMA (www.preforma-project.eu) is a Pre-Commercial Procurement project co-funded by the European Commission within the framework of the FP7 ICT Programme with the aim to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term and to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives.
Applications are invited from candidates who possess the necessary qualifications in order to fill one (1) full time Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher (ESR) Fellow Position in the Digital Heritage Research Lab of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT) in the research fields of 2D/3D/4D Digitalization (automated methodologies for 2D and 3D data acquisition: photogrammetry, Laser Scanning, depth camera sensors, SfM etc.), Computer Vision (Image processing, geometric invariant visual features, data-preprocessing/filtering, Pattern recognition), Computer Graphics (modeling), Metadata enrichment for tangible and intangible Cultural Heritage, Big Data and Cloud Computing applications.
The conference was hosted at the astonishing location of the Niguliste Church in the Old Town of Tallinn. The Church was turned in a museum and also used for conferences and as a concert hall. Among other artworks, it hosts the exceptional Altarpiece by Herman Rode, one of the masterpieces in Estonian cultural heritage.
During the 
