Long Term Management of Private Digital Assets

The lifetime of each individual is accompanied by a growing amount of digital assets, e.g. documents, pictures etc. Important digital assets will exist longer than the typical lifespan of the respective technology used for its creation, i.e. for several decades. We are looking for supportive technologies that help individuals in preserving their digital assets. Furthermore, documents might be involved in transactions with a third party, a topic that has to be handled for long-living digital assets, too. Our work concentrates on basic technologies that treat these digital assets as first class citizens in a changing digital environment called cyberworld in the sequel. Most important for us are ontologies and active agents based on a reliable data management infrastructure. First results provide helpful insight in the next steps to be taken along the road to a secure, trust fully environment that helps individuals in their long term management of digital assets.