Use of the software FAQs

In this section, information on the general use of the Testbed software can be found. If you have any remaining questions, please contact the Helpdesk for further details: helpdesktb(at)planets-project.eu .

Am I allowed to use private experiment input (e.g. copyrighted material)?

The current vision of the Testbed subproject is the following:

All data stored in the central Testbed instance will be available to all users. Executing experiments on private data is not encouraged: even if the results of those experiments will be added to the central experiment database, this practice would make reproducibility of experiments impossible.

What is the difference between local and central instances?

The Testbed software can be downloaded fromLocal Instance page?, installed on your local machine, and be therefore deployed as your local Testbed instance. This will allow all Planets partners to experiment with the code base before an actual system of central instances is deployed.

The central instance of the Testbed is now available at HATII. This instance will also host the Testbed corpora and the central Testbed database and it will be the main one used for experimentation in the course of the project. The advantage of using a central Testbed instance will be that the large number of experiments carried out by the various partners will be kept together and aggregated in order to achieve higher statistical significance.

Because of this, the Helpdesk will not support the use of a local instance of the Testbed software.

May I use the Testbed data and tools but not the application?

The Testbed subproject is planning to make experiment results, stored in the Experiment Database, available to the whole Digital Preservation community, together with the Testbed corpora of digital object. However, it is not planned at the moment to put in place facilities to perform experiments without using the Testbed application.

What corpora are currently available?

To do