AIA NAS9300-002

This standard is a part of the NAS9300 Series. This standard
addresses requirements for the long term archiving of digital
product information, applicable to the international aerospace
industry.

Data shall be available to meet regulatory, legal, contractual
and business requirements.

Initially, this document sums up the main business requirements
for long term archiving of digital product data. Although these
requirements are not in themselves normative, when making data
available over an extended period, it is a fundamental principle
that the contextual data needed to interpret the data is also
available.

This standard uses the OAIS reference model to provide
comparability with other approaches to keeping information
available. However, OAIS is a standard reference model for
comparison, not a standard for implementation. Consequently, this
document defines requirements for processes (and associated
technologies) intended to make data available for the life of a
product, and does so in terms of the OAIS model.

In dealing with traditional media, the differences between
substantial change and unimportant "surface" change are generally
self-evident. For example, the yellowing of paper over time, or the
encrustation of a gravestone with lichen do not loose the
information contained, whereas the loss of pages of a document, or
the erosion of the stone do so, and archiving focuses on the
preservation of the medium. For digital product data, the medium is
unimportant, but the content can be corrupted. The subject of the
(many) remaining parts of this standard is the identifciation of
the information that shall be uncorrupted if digital product data
is to be usable in the future, and the consequent refinement of
processes and procedures to insure this.

This standard addresses, archiving of digital product data
required for product definition, such as in three-dimensional
representations a tolerances, material properties, manufacturing
data, etc, specification call-outs, product structure and
configuration control data, etc. Other parts of the NAS9300
standards will cover more specifically the long term archiving of,
for example, composites, electrical systems, product analyses and
product simulation information.

This standard also addresses managing the evolution of
technologies required to ensure the availability and usability of
the data for the required archiving period.

This standard is not intended to incorporate company specific
requirements and does not dictate specific organizational
structures within a company. This standard does not specify a
design or an implementation of an archive system. Actual
implementations may distribute responsibilities or break out
functionality differently.

This standard assumes that all requirements for configuration
management of the product data are in place and therefore are not
specifically described in this document.

If an organization chooses to implement requirements beyond
those outlined in this requirements document, those additional
requirements shall not conflict or negatively impact the
requirements contained in this document.

Purpose: This standard establishes legal and other business
requirements for processes intended to preserve digital data. Data
need to be stored and maintained so that data are retrievable and
usable for the required archiving period. In addition, for some
business requirments, data need to be authentically preserved and
accessed.

This standard is intended to allow for different implementations
based on a company's specific business environment.