http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2008/09/08/draft-standard-for-long-term-archiving-of-cad-data/
September’s edition of BSI’s Update Standards magazine alerted me to another batch of standards, currently at the public comment stage, which are of particular relevance to digital preservation. The BS EN 9300 family is entitled ‘Long term archiving and retrieval of digital technical product documentation such as 3D, CAD and PDM data‘ and 5 parts (100; 110; 007; 005; 002 and 115) are open for comment until September 30th. I was initially surprised that I had heard nothing of this series of standards before, and wasn’t sure if this was simply lack of observation on my part or because they had come from an entirely different domain. They clearly aren’t new – unlike BS10008, which I wrote about in June, this is not a home-grown British Standard but one which is being proposed ‘for adoption’ – which means that it’s already been adopted by another body somewhere. That status also means that you can’t use BSI’s excellent online commenting system. You have to buy the drafts from BSI on paper, so far as I can see.
In fact, as I was relieved to note, this group of standards isn’t entirely new to the digital preservation community, and the authors are also aware of general DP standards such as OAIS. They derive from a group of standards known as STEP (Standard for Exchange of Product Model Data), codified in ISO 10303. STEP came up in a presentation and discussions at PresDB’07, although it’s been in development since the turn of the century at least. But STEP is a huge family of standards, and this particular work appears to have emerged from specific work going on in the aerospace industry, which is known to have had concerns about long-term survival of CAD data for some time.
LOTAR is one of the results of this concern, and a presentation by Pierre Duchier of AIRBUS at an Aristote conference in April this year gives a clear picture of the concerns of industry and the approach they are taking. LOTAR and related work were also covered at a invitation-only event at Bath in 2007, Atlantic Workshop on Long-Term Knowledge Retrieval whose attendees included many names familiar from the DCC and the repository community.
Overall, this is reassuring. Here is a set of digital preservation standards being developed and driven by concerns in industry, but where the work is taking place in dialogue with with the academic research and development community. CAD data in particular has long been a concern at the Archaeology Data Service, which has significant holdings of Autocad files, and it will be interesting to see to what extent LOTAR has relevance for such activities. In the meantime, I can see I’ve got a lot of reading to do to catch up, but it would be interesting to hear from others who have more insight into the possible use of these standards outside the aerospace industry.
Incidentally, BS EN 9300 is not to be confused with BS EN ISO 9300, an entirely different standard concerned with “Measurement of gas flow by means of critical flow Venturi nozzles“. 
