A modular infrastructure for the management of authenticity and persistent identifiers in long term digital preservation

Observation and experimental data have become a crucial asset for most scientific communities, which are bound to conveniently preserve them in order to allow reliable assessments on their provenance and integrity, based on suitable and well-documented evidence. On the other hand, these data often go through quite complex lifecycles that include both changes of custody and transformations of their representation. Managing authenticity has therefore become a central issue in long term digital preservation. In this paper we present a model for the management of authenticity evidence, developed within two EU funded projects, APARSEN and SCDIP-ES, that has led to the implementation of a modular framework, which may be exploited both in implementing new repositories and in improving existing ones. The infrastructure we propose is based on open source technology and specifically meant to guarantee a large degree of scalability and full interoperability among repositories that are based on it.