FAST 2012

We gave a work-in-progress paper (PDF) and a well-received poster (PDF) on our economic modeling work at the 2012 FAST conference. As usual, the technical sessions featured some very interesting papers, although this year it was hard to find any relevant to long-term storage. Below the fold are notes on the papers that caught my eye.

Cloud Storage Pricing History

The original motivation for my work on the economics of long-term storage was to figure out whether it made sense to use cloud storage for systems such as LOCKSS. Last December I finally got around to looking at the history of Amazon S3's pricing, and I was surprised to see that in nearly 6 years the price for the first TB had dropped from $0.15/GB/mo to $0.14/GB/mo. Since then, Amazon has dropped the price to $0.125/GB/mo, so the average drop in price is now about 3%/yr.

I wondered whether this very slow price drop was representative of the cloud storage industry in general, so I went looking. Below the fold is what I found, and some of the implications for cloud use for long-term storage.

Tide Pools and Terrorists

There's an article in the current issue of Stanford's alumni magazine that discusses, in a very accessible way, many of the concepts people need to think about when designing systems for long-term digital preservation. Raphael D. Sagarin has evolved from studying how organisms in the Monterey tide pools adapt to climate change, to critiquing responses to terrorist incidents. He suggests we have a lot to learn from the way organisms respond and adapt to threats. For example:

STRATEGY 1: Embrace uncertainty. In the natural world, they argue, most species increase uncertainty for their enemies by deploying multiple strategies for attack or defense. Think of the octopus, says Sagarin: "It's got an ink cloud it can use; it's got a beak it can use; some of them have poison; they've got these suckers; it's got really good camouflage." If one strategy doesn't work, it can fall back on another.

Increasing uncertainty for the enemy is one major aspect of the defenses of the LOCKSS system. The more you increase your certainty about what your preservation system is doing, the easier you make it for an enemy or an error to affect large parts of the system. In the long term, randomization is your friend. So is:

STRATEGY 2: Decentralize. "Putting homeland security in the hands of a massive, plodding bureaucracy hardly represents evolutionary advancement," ... Sagarin's ideal defense would operate more like the human immune system—with units that react semiautonomously to threats, loosely governed by a central command. "Instead of relying on a centralized brain or controller for everything, you farm out the responsibility of searching for and responding to changes in the environment to many, many different agents," he says.

LOCKSS boxes are autonomous, only loosely coordinated, in exactly this manner. The more coordinated the behavior of the parts of your system, the more correlated are the failures.

The whole article is worth a careful read, as is Sagarin's Adapt or Die article in Foreign Policy.

Domain Name Persistence

Last December a useful workshop on Domain Name Persistence was held in conjunction with the 7^th International Digital Curation Conference. My comments on the need for persistent domain names are below the fold.

The 5 Stars of Online Journal Articles

David Shotton, another participant in last summer's Dagstuhl workshop on Future of Research Communications, has an important article in D-Lib entitledThe Five Stars of Online Journal Articles — a Framework for Article Evaluation. By analogy with Tim Berners-Lee's Five Stars of Linked Open Data, David suggests assessing online articles against five criteria:

• peer review
• open access
• enriched content
• available datasets
• machine-readable metadata

For each criterion, he provides a five-point scale. For example, the open access scale goes from 0 for no open access to 4 for Creative Commons licensing. The full article is well worth a read, especially for David's careful explanation of the impacts of each point on the scale of each criterion on the usefulness of the content.

The article concludes by applying the evaluation to a number of articles (including itself). In this spirit, here is my evaluation of our SOSP '03 paper:

• peer review: 2 - Responsive peer review
• open access: 1 - Self-archiving green/gratis open access
• enriched content: 1 - Active Web links
• available datasets: 1 - Supplementary information files available
• machine-readable metadata: 1- Structural markup available

Yahoo's HTML5 Tools

Last August I wrote about the way HTML5 would accelerate the transition of the Web from static to dynamic content, from a document model to a programming environment. Now, via Slashdot, we learn of Yahoo's plans to open-source most of their tools for publishing HTML5. Details below the fold.

Mass-Market Scholarly Communication Revisted

The very first post to this blog in 2007 was entitled "Mass-Market Scholarly Communication". Its main point was:

Blogs are bringing the tools of scholarly communication to the mass market, and with the leverage the mass market gives the technology, may well overwhelm the traditional forms.

Now, Annotum: An open-source authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress is proving me a prophet.

It was developed based on experience with PLOS Currents, a rapid publishing journal hosted at Google. After a detailed review of the alternatives, the developers decided to implement Annotum as a WordPress theme providing the capabilities needed for journal publishing, such as multiple authors, strict adherence to JATS (the successor to the NLM DTD), tables, figures, equations, references and review. The leverage of mass-market publishing technology is considerable. The paper describing Annotum is well worth a read.