Preserving Secondary Knowledge
Using Language Models for Software Preservation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v18i1.930Abstract
Emulation and migration are still our main tools for digital curation and preservation practice. Both strategies have been discussed extensively and have been demonstrated to be effective and applicable in various scenarios. Discussions have primarily centered on technical feasibility, workflow integration, and usability. However, there remains one important aspect when discussing these two techniques: managing and preserving operational knowledge. Both approaches require specialized knowledge but especially emulation requires future users to also have a great variety of knowledge about past software and computer systems for successful operation. We investigate how this knowledge can be stored and utilized, and to what extent it can be rendered machine-actionable, using modern large language models. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept implementation that operates an emulated software environment through natural language.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Klaus Rechert, Rafael Gieschke
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright for papers and articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the University of Edinburgh. It is a condition of publication that authors license their paper or article under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Grant numbers 442077441