Digital Preservation (DP) is traditionally understood as the management of digital information over time. The digital preservation problem is well-understood for query-centric information scenarios but has been less explored for scenarios where the important digital information to be preserved is the execution context within which data is processed, analysed, transformed and rendered.

A primary motivation for TIMBUS is the declining popularity of centralized in-house business processes maintained and owned by single entities. The presence of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Internet of Services (IoS) means business processes are increasingly supported by service oriented systems where numerous services provided by different providers, located in different geographical locations are composed to form value added service compositions and service systems which will continue changing and evolving. Besides the advantages of SaaS and IoS there is the danger of services and service providers disappearing (for various reasons) leaving partially complete business processes.
TIMBUS will endeavour to enlarge the understanding of DP to include the set of activities, processes and tools that ensure continued access to services and software necessary to produce the context within which information can be accessed, properly rendered, validated and transformed into context based knowledge. One of the fundamental requirements is to preserve the functional and non-functional specifications of services and software, along with their dependencies. This enlarged understanding brings DP clearly into the domain of Business Continuity Management (BCM).

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