About the Significant Properties of Software Project

Software is complex - and to establish what characterises software is very open ended. The Significant Properties of Software project is a short study into what properties are significant in order to allow the software to be systematically preserved in a reusable state for the long-term.

Definition of Significant Properties

Significant properties, also referred to as “significant characteristics” or “essence”, are essential attributes of a digital object which affect its appearance, behaviour, quality and usability. They can be grouped into categories such as content, context (metadata), appearance (e.g. layout, colour), behaviour (e.g. interaction, functionality) and structure (e.g. pagination, sections). Significant properties must be preserved over time for the digital object to remain accessible and meaningful.

Significant properties have been considered in for a number of digital objects, such as text documents and raster images. However, to date there has been no substantial study specifically into software.

Scope

Software is a very large subject with a huge variation in the nature of the software, with a spectrum including microcode, real-time control, operating systems, business systems, desktop applications, distributed systems, and expert systems, with an equally wide range of applications and also constraints of the business model from personally coded systems (typical in research), open-source systems, to commercial packages.

In a small study such as this we cannot attempt to consider the whole of this wide spectrum. Consequently, we have restricted our scope to consider particular domains in mathematical, scientific and e-Science software. which we believe is of interest to a large part of the academic and research community, and should be representative for a large number of the significant properties.

Funding

The study is funded by JISC http://www.jisc.ac.uk under the JISC Digital Preservation and Records Management Programme: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_preservation . There are a number of other studies into other digital objects which are also underway.

The project runs from July to December 2007.

-- BrianMatthews - 21 Sep 2007