Quantifying the Digital Heritage: A UNESCO-Inspired Value Index for Software Archives
Abstract
The Software Heritage (SWH) archive pursues the monumental mission of preserving the world’s software source code. However, the advent of generative AI has triggered an AI Code Explosion, exponentially accelerating the production of synthesized code and leading to severe storage capacity challenges. As preserving the entirety of global source code indefinitely presents an increasing physical and economic challenge for decentralized mirror servers, complementary strategies for archival prioritization become a valuable consideration. This poster introduces the Universal Value Index (UVI), a highly scalable, graph-topological heuristic model designed to quantify the “Outstanding Universal Value” of software repositories to assist in decentralized capacity planning. Inspired by established UNESCO World Heritage criteria, the UVI evaluates repositories across four dimensions: Impact, Time, Rarity, and Quality, alongside specific penalizations for redundant forks and data bloat. While determining objective value is intrinsically challenging, our preliminary goal is to provide a consistent and transparent first-step prioritization for archiving. By offering a mathematical framework mapped to cultural heritage standards, the UVI enables digital archivists to make scalable triage decisions to help secure critical digital infrastructure.
