APARSEN D24.1 - Report on Authenticity and Plan for Interoperable Authenticity Evaluation System

The first part of the report is devoted to the state of art. We analyse the main international projects in the field, as well as the standards, recommendations and guidelines for keeping and preserving digital objects, with a special attention on the management of provenance and authenticity. The state of the art is completed by an extensive reference list and by an appendix where all the major projects in the area, their goals and their results are individually presented. On the whole, the state of the art testifies that significant scientific contributions have been given, and that a good level of theoretical formalization has been achieved in this area, even if a large gap still divides the mostly theoretical results of the scientific community from the actual practices carried on in most repositories. This gap needs to be filled with more concrete guidelines and proposals. Acting in this direction we propose a model of the digital object lifecycle, in order to identify the main events that impact on authenticity and provenance and to investigate in detail, for each of them the evidence that has to be gathered in order to conveniently document the history of the digital object. The crucial problem to be addressed is, of course, interoperability, since along its lifecycle the digital object may go through several changes of custody, and therefore the authenticity evidence needs to be managed and interpreted by systems, both keeping and preservation systems, which may be different from the ones that gathered it. Thus, the authenticity evidence needs to comply with a common standard. Achieving such a standard is a quite an ambitious goal, but some basic guidelines can be developed. The model and the guidelines proposed in this report may be considered as a preliminary step in this direction, and a basis to derive operational guidelines to improve the current (and often very limited) practices in managing authenticity and provenance in keeping and preservation systems. The report also documents other important activities that have been carried as part of APARSEN WP24. Interesting original results are presented about provenance interoperability and reasoning (described in detail at ID2401), which include a discussion of the mapping between different provenance models, and the proposal of a set of relevant reasoning rules for reducing the amount of provenance information that has to be explicitly stored and for making corrections easier. A further discussion is devoted to secure logging mechanisms, a specific aspect of the problem, which has a significant impact on managing authenticity