CCSDS RECOMMENDED PRACTICE FOR AN OAIS REFERENCE MODEL
CCSDS 650.0-M-2 Page 4-6 June 2012
The Receive Submission function provides the appropriate storage capability or devices to
receive a SIP from the Producer (or from Administration). Digital SIPs may be delivered via
electronic transfer (e.g., FTP), loaded from media submitted to the Archive, or simply
mounted (e.g., CD-ROM) on the Archive file system for access. Non-digital SIPs would
likely be delivered by conventional shipping procedures. The Receive Submission function
may represent a legal transfer of custody for the Content Information in the SIP, and may
require that special access controls be placed on the contents. This function provides a
confirmation of receipt of a SIP to the Producer, which may include a request to resubmit a
SIP in the case of errors resulting from the SIP submission.
Evidence for Authenticity is provided by the Producer as part of the PDI in the submission,
and this evidence is maintained, updated, and/or incremented by the Archive over time. The
Producer may provide, or the Archive may itself define, as part of the Provenance
Information, Information Property Descriptions of Information Properties which should
be maintained over time, and indeed may provide Information Property Descriptions of
Information Properties which do not need to be maintained over time. An Information
Property is that part of the Content Information as described by the Information Property
Description. An Information Property Description is a description of a part of the information
content of a Content Information object that is highlighted for a particular purpose. The detailed
expression, or value, of that part of the information content is conveyed by the appropriate parts
of the Content Data Object and its Representation Information. For example, consider a simple
digital book which when rendered appears as pages with margins, title, chapter headings,
paragraphs, and text lines composed of words and punctuation. Information Property
Descriptions for Information Properties that must be preserved could be expressed as
‘paragraph identification’ and ‘characters expressing words and punctuation’. The
Information Properties would consist of all the book’s paragraph identifications, words, and
punctuation as expressed by the Content Data Object and its Representation Information.
This means that all formatting other than the recognition of paragraphs and readable text
could be altered while still maintaining required preservation. The Archive may express an
evaluation of the Authenticity of its holdings, based on community practice and
recommendations (including best practices, guidelines, standards, and legal requirements).
For example scientific Archives may have less stringent evaluation criteria than State
Archives; however, the Consumer may make his/her own judgment of the Authenticity
starting with the evidence obtained from PDI.
The Quality Assurance function validates (QA results) the successful transfer of the SIP to
the temporary storage area. For digital submissions, these mechanisms might include Cyclic
Redundancy Checks (CRCs) or checksums associated with each data file, or the use of
system log files to record and identify any file transfer or media read/write errors.
The Generate AIP function transforms one or more SIPs into one or more AIPs that conform
to the Archive’s data formatting standards and documentation standards. This may involve
file format conversions, gathering adequate Representation Information, data representation
conversions or reorganization of the Content Information in the SIPs. The Generate AIP
function may issue report requests to Data Management to obtain reports of information
needed by the Generate AIP function to produce the Descriptive Information that completes