Long term preservation of product lifecycle metadata in OAIS archives

摘要

The product lifecycle spans from idea generation, design, manufacturing, and service todisposal. During all these phases, engineers use their knowledge to fulll their tasks.If engineers retire or leave a company, their embodied knowledge also resigns. To circumventsuch loss of important company's intellectual property, and to enable traceabilityand reuse of product data in the future, the engineer's knowledge is capturedas metadata and then used as annotation for product lifecycle data. Since such annotatedproduct data models represent meaning in conformance with ontologies, productdata can easier be explored, understood and reused by future product lifecycle actors.For business, contractual, and legal reasons, these semantically enriched modelsare ingested into OAIS (Open Archival Information System) based archives for laterreuse.Notably, it is not uncommon for a product service provider to operate products forseveral decades; even after the engineers whose embodied knowledge supports their operationretire or leave the company. This product longevity and volatile knowledge,alongside rapid technological innovations and evolving ontologies result in dicultiesof reusing archived product data in the long-term. Especially, domain ontologies mustreect changes in real world phenomena which they describe. Therefore, special preservationprocesses are required to prevent semantic obsolescence of archived product datadue to changes in domain conceptualization and to keep the archived product data andmetadata interpretable.While preservation of the data is concerned with product data normalization, validationand le format migration, the preservation processes for metadata are of a dierentnature given that referenced ontologies evolve independently from the products theydescribe. Although widely referenced, the OAIS reference model unfortunately does notobserve ontology evolution or metadata preservation in any depth. This thesis thereforeaims to introduce dedicated metadata harmonization functionality into OAIS archives,based on operational ontology update processing which together build a semantic digitalarchive system architecture that enables to preserve captured metadata under knowledgeevolution.