Provenance and authenticity

To ensure clear provenance and authenticity tracking of each deposit, the ADA is basing its Workflows in the Open Archival Information System (or OAIS) model.

Depositors are required to sign an ADA Data License (see Rights Management) confirming they have the right to share the data. The original data and metadata a depositor submits to the ADA Deposit Dataverse (see Storage & Integrity) instance is preserved unchanged as a Submission Information package (SIP) by the ADA Processing Tool (ADAPT). ADAPT is a web-based tool developed by ADA to ensure that data and metadata in the Archive are programmatically moved between Dataverse instances and ADA’s archival storage. ADAPT implements PROV-O to express basic classes to log these activities. Any curation required is done on a copy of the data.

Curation and processing of the data are recorded in a processing report supplied to and approved by the depositor, and also programmatically for quantitative data in SPSS or R syntax. These documents are stored under a unique ADA ID with the SIP as part of the Archival information package (AIP), see Quality Assurance for details of the curation.

The Dissemination Information package (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 for user access (see Storage & Integrity).

Changes or updates to the data files of an already published deposit are treated like 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.

Once the data is published on the Production Dataverse, any changes to files and metadata are tracked in Dataverse’s versioning.