A reference architecture for archival systems with application to product models
Nowadays, a major part of the information is in digital form. Digital preservation is essential to allowpeople to access information over time. From a computer science perspective, two major objectiveshave to be met to enable digital preservation: developing archival systems to manage the preserveddigital information, and select information representations that will facilitate the preservation. For complexinformation such as product models, these two objective are particularly hard to meet. Archivalsystems have to operate in a complex environment, interact with many different systems, and supportmay different business functions. Product model representations do not use all the possibilitiesof computer interpretation.Regarding the development of archival systems, the key is to determine what has to be described toprove that the archival system can effectively support the digital preservation. The Reference Modelfor an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) proposes a terminology to describe and comparearchives. The Audit and Certification of Trustworthy Digital Repository (ACTDR) provides criteria forthe certification of archives. One issue with these efforts is that there is not guidance on how to usethem within archival system descriptions.This thesis proposes a method called Reference Architecture for Archival Systems (RAAS) to describearchival systems implementations. RAAS relies on the DoD Architecture Framework to describethe various aspects of the archival systems. Moreover, RAAS provides an archival-specificterminology inspired by the OAIS Reference Model. RAAS also explains how the archival systemdescription can help for the ACTDR certification.RAAS is applied to a product model preservation case, to describe the various aspects of the archivalsystem. This description includes the interactions involving the archival systems, the archival systemfunctions, the definition of the preserved content, and the definition of the metadata. This descriptionformally refers to the OAIS terminology, and provides ACTDR certification evidence.This thesis also address the representation of product models by proposing the translation of productmodels from STEP to OWL. STEP is a standard for product model representation. The use ofOWL enables semantic relationship to enrich product information, and improve the search and theunderstanding of this information using data integration.The methodology used in this thesis can apply to other types of information, such as medical records