Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6.4 OAIS Functional Model
The Functional Model is what one often sees in expositions or train-
ing sessions about OAIS. However, although this provides some
important vocabulary, and provides a good checklist if one is creating
an archive, it is not relevant to OAIS compliance.
6.4.1 OAIS Functional Entities
The role provided by each of the entities in Fig.
6.8
is described briefly by OAIS as
follows:
The
Ingest
entity provides the services and functions to accept Submission
Information Packages (SIPs) from Producers (or from internal elements under
Administration control) and prepare the contents for storage and management within
the archive. Ingest functions include receiving SIPs, performing quality assurance
on SIPs, generating an Archival Information Package (AIP) which complies with
the archive's data formatting and documentation standards, extracting Descriptive
Information from the AIPs for inclusion in the archive database, and coordinating
updates to Archival Storage and Data Management.
The
Archival Storage
entity provides the services and functions for the storage,
maintenance and retrieval of AIPs. Archival Storage functions include receiving
AIPs from Ingest and adding them to permanent storage, managing the storage hier-
archy, refreshing the media on which archive holdings are stored, performing routine
and special error checking, providing disaster recovery capabilities, and providing
AIPs to Access to fulfil orders.
The
Data Management
entity provides the services and functions for populating,
maintaining, and accessing both Descriptive Information which identifies and doc-
uments archive holdings and administrative data used to manage the archive. Data
Management functions include administering the archive database functions (main-
taining schema and view definitions, and referential integrity), performing database
updates (loading new descriptive information or archive administrative data), per-
forming queries on the data management data to generate query responses, and
producing reports from these query responses.
The
Administration
entity provides the services and functions for the overall
operation of the archive system. Administration functions include soliciting and
negotiating submission agreements with Producers, auditing submissions to ensure
that they meet archive standards, and maintaining configuration management of sys-
tem hardware and software. It also provides system engineering functions to monitor
and improve archive operations, and to inventory, report on, and migrate/update
the contents of the archive. It is also responsible for establishing and maintaining
archive standards and policies, providing customer support, and activating stored
requests.
