Home About us ISO 10303-235 Information Engineering

The OAIS framework stages

1.  Ingest - input the data records plus the metadata to enable them to be found in the future.

2.  Data management - ensure the quality control and quality assurance of the input data.

This needs a specification for the records as a basis for the quality control and the standards from ISO TC184/SC4 provide these specifications.

3.  Storage -  the physical storage of data including back-up and migration to new media when required.

4.  Preservation planning - ensuring that the data is not just a stream of unreadable digital bits when future access is required and the originating software and systems are no longer available.

This requires the conservation of the semantics of the data as well as the syntax and this combination is achievable with the standards from ISO TC184/SC4.

5.  Access - finding the records in the archive and distributing them to appropriate users.

6.  Administration - the operation and maintenance of the archive.


The conservation of engineering information for future use can be managed as an instance of the Open Archival Information System (OAIS framework).  Originally developed by NASA, the framework has been adopted by ISO as ISO 14721:2003.  The framework has six stages and two of these, highlighted below,  benefit from the technologies and standards developed by ISO TC184/SC4.

The use of the OAIS framework with some SC4 standards has been demonstrated in the LOTAR project.

Conservation of Information:

ISO 14721:2003