A New Approach to Preservation Metadata for Scientific Data: A Real World Example

The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model was developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) in the late 1990s and was adopted as an ISO standard in 2003 (ISO14721:2003) [1]. Recently, many data centers and archives around the world have started to adopt this protocol. As a notable example, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States of America adopted the model for their Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS). CLASS is expected to be the primary repository and access portal for NOAA's Earth science, satellite-remote-sensing data [2]. Because of the huge scale of these efforts, it is important to carefully consider the manner in which the OAIS Reference Model is implemented. The specifics of the implementation could impact the preservation and therefore the use and usability of vast quantities of remote sensing data for many years.