Contents:
- 1. Introduction
- 2. State of the Art: 2.1 Longterm Digital Preservation Research Projects
- 2.2 Standards, Requirements and Recommendations
- 3. A Basic Framework for Authenticity and Provenance
- 4. A Model for Managing Authenticity and Provenance through the Digital Lifecycle
- 5. Guidelines for the Management of Authenticity Evidence
- 6. Secure Logging Mechanisms
- 7. Provenance Interoperability and Reasoning
- 8. Articulation with the rest APARSEN WPS and Tasks
- 9. Integration and Outreach
- 10. Conclusions
- References
- Appendix – Research Projects
This report investigates and discusses how best to capture evidence about authenticity and provenance and to evaluate authenticity and provenance in a common way that allows the interoperability required to support changes in data holders and processing. It proposes a model for managing authenticity and provenance through the digital resource lifecycle which may constitute a sound basis for deriving operational guidelines for the actual practice of digital preservation. The first part of the report (section 2) is devoted to the state of art with specific reference to the main projects, standards and recommendations on digital preservation with the aim of capturing the outputs relevant for building a consistent framework and related guidelines to assess the authenticity of digital resources, on the basis of a common and well recognized terminology. The conceptual and methodological background is summarized in section 3, and this basic framework for authenticity and provenance management represents a starting point to shift the investigation towards a more practical ground and at the same time to a more systematic and complete approach. In section 4 a model of the digital resource lifecycle is presented in order to identify the main events that impact on authenticity and provenance and to investigate in detail, for each of them, the evidence that has to be gathered in order to conveniently document the history of the digital resource. A main concern is interoperability, since along the lifecycle there may be several changes of custody, and therefore the evidence about authenticity and provenance needs to be managed and interpreted by systems, both keeping and preservation systems, which may be different from the ones that gathered it. In section 5 a preliminary step towards consensus is proposed, by translating the model presented in section 4 into practical guidelines which could be actually adopted in specific real-life environments, in order to improve the current (and often very limited) practices in managing authenticity and provenance in keeping and preservation systems. These guidelines can be also considered as a first substantial step in the direction of interoperability, since they provide a uniform and systematic framework for the management of the authenticity evidence, therefore facilitating the exchange of information among heterogeneous systems. Section 6 deals with a specific aspect of the problem which has a significant impact on managing authenticity: secure logging mechanisms. More specifically it investigates the problems related to performing semi-automated audits of log files in archives and to assessing the capabilities of an archive for providing evidence of interactions – be it regular or even malicious – with the system in a secure way. Section 7 deals with provenance interoperability and reasoning. It discusses the mapping between different provenance models, as OPM (Open Provenance model) promoted by W3C and CRMdig an extension of the CIDOC CRM ontology for capturing digital resources, and proposes a set of relevant reasoning rules. Finally, section 8 describes how this work is related to other APARSEN work packages and tasks, in section 9 we discuss the integration of the activity in WP 24 with other projects and how the results of the RTD activity could be actually translated into practice, and in section 10 we give our concluding remarks. Further material is presented in the Appendix that provides individual descriptions for all the research projects analyzed in the state of the art. Case studies that test the model can be found in the APARSEN deliverable D24.2, Implementing and Testing of an Authenticity Protocol on a Specific Domain.
This dense and comprehensive report offers helpful guidance on how to approach the management of authenticity within a digital lifecycle management system. Its model offers archive staff designing a digital repository good insight and a methodology on a subject not easily translated to practical implementation. It can be especially interesting for those working on pre-ingest and ingest related workflow development. Although it is does not present examples from the audiovisual domain, the model is still relevant. The methodology enables archives to develop an “authenticity management policy”, one that defines rules and provides guidance on how authenticity evidence should be collected and managed. The state of the art section on preservation projects provides a useful overview of the many projects in this domain. The companion deliverable D24.2 with case studies applying the proposed model is also worth reading.