OASIS Archive : INFO

This website submits a comprehensive report of the OASIS activities. OASIS is the acronym of Open Archiving System with Internet Sharing. It was funded as a project by the European Union under the master program Culture2000, Agreement No. 2004 – 1475 / 001 – 001.

An international consortium had been formed by cooperation agreements together with

• Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe
• International Center for Art and New Technologies – CIANT in Prague
• University of Science and Technology – AGH in Krakow
• Netherlands Media Art Institute – MONTEVIDEO in Amsterdam
• Festival for media arts Les Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques in Marseille.

OASIS Website

The OASIS website covers the entire duration of the project from May 2004 until April 2007. Based on the detailed descriptions as well as the results available on the web it shows that the project can be considered to be successfully concluded. Currently the OASIS Platform is made available the public.

The documentation expands on the artistic and technological developments and presents the results of the basic research. This is followed by remarks on the distribution and utilisation of the funding. Finally we outline in which form the work of OASIS will continue to exist and where real efforts of consolidation and extension have emerged. Thus the desired sustainability of the project is supported.

Please find → here some dedicated information about the OASIS website. This → description introduces into the different website areas.

Results

A network for securing the OASIS platform after the funded period has been founded.

The OASIS platform also allows interested partner institutions to → participate and make their own content and databases available via the OASIS platform - regardless of already existing structures. Read the → resignation for new OASIS partners.

To achieve this they interface the database adapters to their own systems and thus enable a link-up to the OASIS middleware. Software and documentation (handbook) were an integral part of/central task within the project and are now available.

Summary of results

When developing strategies into the → sustainable preservation and presentation of electronic art of art the availability and access to the content plays an important role. Therefore the aim of the OASIS project was to develop and instigate an open and non-location bound, distributed - thus networked - platform for the presentation of electronic art.

The key elements of the OASIS platform are the → Middleware Software and the → Database adapter.

While the middleware processes the OASIS requests and is responsible for the analysing of the search results, the database adapter deals with mapping and translating the different databases of the partners.
Both software and configuration modules are based on a mutual metadata model, which facilitates the compatibility of the partners.
The results from extensive analyses of the → different partners’ databases and → general studies into metadata have been worked into the metadata model. The → OASIS metadata model extends the standard of Dublin Core with entries specific to electronic art.

A common → search frontend was set up. It made it possible to research in the different databases in the different locations at the same time. For this the development of new software modules was necessary.

→ Codecs test were performed and evaluated. In addition different test series with suitable codices for processing multimedia data were executed. From those → results] strategies and starting points for the sustainable preservation of electronic artworks were developed and made available as a guideline.

In → conferences, exhibitions and an electronic arts festival the content and developments were presented to a wider public.