Descriptive Metadata Requirements for Long-term Archival of Digital Product Models | NIST

Digital product engineering information comes from a variety of applications ranging from computer-aided design, engineering, and manufacturing software to product data and lifecycle management systems. As the volume of digital engineering data increases, so does the need to archive this information for longterm use. The challenges of archiving this information are evident in the U.S. Navy’s Torpedo Weapon Retriever (TWR) data set. In order to build an effective archival information system from the TWR data, an ingest process must include the generation of descriptive metadata to aid in future access of archived TWR information. Descriptive metadata is essential for supporting long-term access requirements for ship product model data. Through determining descriptive metadata requirements and by attempting to successfully generate TWR descriptive metadata during ingest, we can (1) gain insight into the feasibility of generalizing ship data ingest and customizing tools developed by the digital library community for engineering-specific applications, (2) help to coordinate ongoing long-term archiving efforts in the engineering design community with the work of digital library researchers and archivists, and (3) establish requirements for long-term archiving of engineering data produced by computer-aided design/engineering and product data/lifecycle management software applications.