Provenance and authenticity

To ensure the clear provenance and authenticity of each deposit, ADA has based its archival workflow on the OAIS Reference Model (refer to Workflows [34] for further detail).

Data depositors are required to sign an ADA Data License Agreement to license ADA the right to share the data. Licensing is covered under Rights Management [26].

The original data and metadata submitted by a depositor to the ADA Deposit Dataverse instance (see Storage and Integrity [37]) is preserved unchanged as a Submission Information Package (SIP) when ingested by the ADA Deposit & Preservation Tool (ADAPT) [6]. ADAPT is a web-based tool developed by ADA to ensure that data and metadata in the archive are programmatically migrated between Dataverse instances and archivist processing as Submission Information Packages (SIP), Archival Information Packages (AIP), and archival storage at publication as Dissemination Information Packages (DIP). ADAPT implements PROV-O [3] to express basic classes to log these activities. Any curation required is done on a copy of the SIP once it has been ingested through ADAPT to ensure integrity of the original deposit.

The curation and processing of the data are recorded in an archivist Processing Report provided to the depositor for response and approval before publication of the data on the ADA Production Dataverse platform. All deposited data and documents are stored in directories under a unique five or six-digit archive identification number (ADAID) as the SIP, along with the AIP, DIP, and PROV-O logs. See Quality Assurance [33] for details of the curation.

The DIP is generated from the AIP and is made accessible on separate instances of Dataverse, first on the Test Dataverse for the depositor to review, then on the Production Dataverse [10] for user access (this process is expanded in Storage and Integrity [37]). See an example of a dataset [85] published on ADA Dataverse for access request.

Changes or updates to the data files of an already published deposit are treated as a new deposit, i.e. a new SIP, AIP and DIP are created. Metadata changes by depositors are managed through the ADA ticketing system, which includes identification checks by ensuring contact information matches the corresponding verified user account on Dataverse, or confirmation from the data custodian.

Once data is published on the Production Dataverse (landing page) [10], any changes to files and metadata are tracked in Dataverse’s versioning with details of any changes accessible to all users. After each publication ADAPT exports the Dataverse system fixity and metadata to the relevant directory identified by the unique ADAID for that dataset for provenance.

References

[34] Workflows - (https://docs.ada.edu.au/index.php/Workflows)

[26] Rights Management - (https://docs.ada.edu.au/index.php/Rights_Management)

[37] Storage & Integrity - (https://docs.ada.edu.au/index.php/Storage_%26_Integrity)

[6] ADAPT - (https://docs.ada.edu.au/index.php/ADAPT)

[3] PROV-O – (https://www.w3.org/TR/2013/REC-prov-o-20130430/)

[33] Quality Assurance - (https://docs.ada.edu.au/index.php/Quality_Assurance)

[85] ADA Dataverse published dataset - (https://dataverse.ada.edu.au/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.26193/4XK0SX)

[10] ADA Production Dataverse - (https://dataverse.ada.edu.au/)