Standard services provided by Data Futures on a flat-rate subscription basis .vs. contract services for reclamation, project development and export

Data Futures freizo migration platform provides long-term accessibility and security for digital methods projects in the humanities. Its implementation-agnostic data representation is designed for efficient migration as technologies evolve over decades, and its deployment infrastructure is continuously updated in response to the evolving internet security landscape. freizo employs geographically distributed computing resources from heterogeneous commercial and institutional suppliers to gain the greatest resilience and cost advantages from the competitive contemporary services market, offering:

internet-based accession workflows that can be tailored to projects' specific needs for rapid import and organization of information from both historic projects and legacy platforms as well as new research
on-going maintenance and refinement of assets acquired from multiple sources for consolidation in a sustainable environment and the support of multiple presentations to public and scholarly audiences
standards-based annotation, interfaces to mainstream virtual research instruments and development of new metadata and analysis functionality
transformation tools to automate the generation of versions of corpora that are compliant with specific standards or compatible with external ecosystems
comprehensive day-to-day project operation facilities including scholarly, contractor and crowd community support using authenticated user accounts—critical when copyright restrictions or integrity of valuable research data arise, or when project personnel change in temporary workforces
fail-over between multiple automatically maintained backup services, preventing data loss and reducing degradation when difficulties are experienced by individual resource providers or when network outages isolate specific data centres or users: automated duplication of project data supports both fault-tolerance and performance scalability

This creates new stability and sustainability opportunities for research data. By sharing costs of i) migration to overcome successive technology obsolescence and ii) continual infrastructure maintenance for reliability and security among many projects freizo unlocks significant (and for the first time forecast-able over long periods) operational cost benefits for participating organizations and also eliminates serial vulnerability as key personnel move on to new positions and departments reorganize.

Project profiles—flat-rate cost basis .vs. development service rate

Projects with existing, mature workflows generally support active research communities for multiple years using Data Futures standard flat-rate services alone. If, on start-up, or from time to time they have evolving acquisition, functionality or export needs then Data Futures contract development service rates may additionally apply. Examples include reclaiming assets from legacy systems, supporting third-party internet presentations, connecting with virtual research instruments or creating versions of corpora compliant with specific standards or compatible with external ecosystems. These are typically work-package-based activities with prior agreement about specification and estimation of timescales and costs. Such services are usually required infrequently and projects subsequently return to long term operation on a flat-rate cost basis. Alternately, projects may have short-term strategies of acquisition, restructuring and export to non-freizo platforms, using Data Futures services on a development cost basis to achieve their goals without any sustaining requirements of flat-rate Services.

Within this general framework, the Data Futures cost model can be summarized as follows:

organizations which employ pre-existing freizo maintenance and research workflows and have stable acquisition, export and presentation tools contribute a €10k annual subscription to Data Futures for flat rate services, including support and regardless of number of projects, provided that binary asset files do not exceed 256GB in volume (all metadata storage is covered by these services, but storage charges are passed to organizations where volumes exceed 256GB under a separate agreement)
Data Futures contract development services are charged at the rate of €780 per developer per day—multiple developers may contribute to complex activities or where member organizations seek to reduce implementation timescales—and agreement of specification leads to conventional quotation, order and invoice administration
upon termination of Data Futures support, member organizations receive LTO tape copies of all metadata and binary assets comprising projects—at media cost only—optionally contract development services may also be specified to deliver projects into external digital humanities ecosystems, commercial asset management systems or specific standards formats—making them independent of Data Futures