CASPAR will address the growing challenge facing society of a deluge of intrinsically fragile digital information, upon which it is increasingly dependent, by building a pioneering framework to support the end-to-end preservation "lifecycle" for scientific, artistic and cultural information, based on existing and emerging standards. The ambitious challenge to build up a common preservation framework for heterogeneous data and a variety of innovative applications will be achieved through the following high level objectives:
• To establish the foundation methodology applicable to a very wide range of pre eservation issues . Th e guiding principle of CASPAR is the application of the OAIS Reference Model .
• T o research, develop and integrate advanced components to be used in a wide range of preservation activities. These components will be the building blocks of the CASPAR Framework
• To create the CASPAR framework: the software platform that enables the building of services and applications that can be adapted to multiple areas .
The CASPAR consortium will demonstrate the validity of the CASPAR framework through heterogeneous testbeds, covering a wide range of disciplines from science to culture to contemporary arts and multi-media, providing a reliable common infrastructure which can be used or replicated in many more areas.