Standardization of Archives
In order to support seem less interoperability, the international standardization organization (ISO) has defined a mechanism for the long time archival of the data, acquired specifically from terrestrial environment & space. The model is based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model.
For document ingest or administration, the standard called Producer-Archive Interface Methodology Abstract Standard was developed. It was further enriched by the standard on data Ingest, Identification, and Certification in Archives, the Archival Workshop on Ingest, Identification, and Certification Standards (AWIICS).
The standard is open and available for implementation free of cost, getting rid of the expensive licenses. As a result, the standard has to be independent of the format used for the representation of the information. The standard provides detailed description for the implementation of the hardware and software components as well as maintenance of the same through the information acquisition, preservation and distribution.
To assist document retrieval, the objects in a digital library are described using XML. The Metadata encoding and transmission standard (METS) schema provides the XML description for encoding descriptive, administrative and structural metadata.
Archive Model
In the archive model, two types of information are associated with a document- the content description information and the archival description information. It supports the binding of the data with the metadata or information. In archival system, the fundamental units of transaction are the objects. An object is a set of files (R. Allen Wyke, 1999) over which operations such as store, restore, archive and copy may be performed.