4.3.3 DATA TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE ARCHIVAL STORAGE AND DATA MANAGEMENT FUNCTIONAL AREAS

The Archival Storage Functional Entity takes the AIPs produced by the Ingest process and merges them into the permanent Archive holdings. The Data Management Functional Entity takes the Package Descriptions produced by Ingest and augments the existing Collection Descriptions to include their contents. The logical model of the ingested data should already be mapped into the logical model of the Archive’s holdings. Thus the major transformation that occurs in this step is the mapping of the acquisition session from the ingest physical data model. This will tend to be on temporary storage, to the permanent storage of the OAIS, which could range from a Database Management Systems (DBMS) to a Hierarchical File Management Systems (HFMS), or any mixture of the above.

The internal view of the OAIS is the permanent representation of the archived data, so all encoding and mappings must be well documented and understood. The transferring of ingest objects is frequently done by a software process such as an HFMS driver or a DBMS. In this case, it is the responsibility of the OAIS to maintain an active copy of the software or careful documentation of the internal formats so the data can be transferred to other systems in the future without loss of information.