Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
current use this may not be advisable. If we had set the preservation objective as
the being the ability to study gravity waves or ozone layering occurring in the
atmosphere above the MST site we would rapidly discover that this is too vague
an objective. This opens too many avenues of investigation when determining the
skill and knowledge base needed to correctly interpret or analyze the data for these
purposes. The unfortunate consequence would have been a time consuming analy-
sis process and a lack of certainty that this objective had been achieved for future
users.
14.4 Defining a Designated User Community
The Designated Community is defined in OAIS [
1
]as“
An identified group
of potential Consumers who should be able to understand a particular set of
information. The Designated Community may be composed of multiple user com-
munities. A Designated Community is defined by the archive and this definition
may change over time
”.
An archive defines the Designated Community for which it is guaranteeing to
preserve some digitally encoded information and must therefore create Archival
Information Packages (AIP) with appropriate Representation Information.
The Designated Community will possess skills and a knowledge base which
allows them to successfully interact with a set of information stored within an
AIP in order to extract required knowledge or recreate the required performance
or behaviour. The analysis of
Chap. 8
provides a way of defining this more specif-
ically. In common with the preservation objective the analysis up to this point
may present one with a range of community groups which the archive may chose
serve.
The definition of the skill set is vital as it limits the amount of information which
must necessarily be (logically) contained within an AIP in order to satisfy a preser-
vation objective. In order to do this the definition of the Designated Community
must be:
•
clear, with sufficient detail to permit meaningful decisions to made regarding
information requirements for effective re-use of the data.
•
realistic and stable in so far as there is reasonable confidence in the persistence
of the knowledge base and skill set.
While the need to define the Designated Community is universal, the nature of a
knowledge and skill set will tend to be domain specific. The following are typical
examples from atmospheric science:
•
ability of a community to successfully operate software i.e. knowledge of correct
syntax to input commands into a UNIX command line.
•
ability to utilize correct analysis techniques with data to remove background
noise or identify specific phenomena
