As part the regular ISO/CCSDS review cycle, the discussion and decisions of the OAIS review process is available from http://review.oais.info.
Five Year Review
In compliance with ISO and CCSDS procedures, a standard must be reviewed every five years and a determination made to reaffirm, modify, or withdraw the existing standard. The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) standard was approved as CCSDS 650.0-B-1 in January 2002 and was approved as ISO standard 14721 in 2003. A comment period for that first issue of the OAIS standard was held at the end of 2006. Based on the comments received, Issue 2 of OAIS, CCSDS 650.0-M-2, was published in June 2012 and was approved as an update to ISO 14721 in August 2012.
Version 3 of OAIS was published by CCSDS in December 2024 and then by ISO in January 2025.
If you wish to participate in the discussions of the suggested changes to OAIS and ISO 16363, please join the MOIMS_DAI mailing list at https://mailman.ccsds.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/moims-dai. This mailing list will be used to co-ordinate discussions and meetings.
OAIS has undergone extensive international reviews both through CCSDS and ISO. The initial version was produced through many workshops and panel discussions involving representatives from a great variety of backgrounds including libraries, archives, science and commerce. After almost 7 years the draft when through first CCSDS reviews and then through ISO, both of which involved many months of international scrutiny. Comments from these reviews fed back and led to improvements in the final 2002 published full international standard.
The process to create the 2012 version involved years of further discussions, first collecting ideas for correction, clarification and addition. Second these improvements where integrated into the document before the third step – CCSDS and ISO international reviews. Further improvements arising from these reviews were integrated, with the agreement of those who mad the comments. Finally the document was published as a full ISO international standard.
Version 3 was produced after many more years of discussion. This issue has additions to, and clarifications of, concepts and terminology, for example:
- The relationship between Preservation Description Information (PDI) and Content Data Object has been clarified, emphasizing that, as has been stated since the original version of OAIS, any Information Object may serve as Content Information.
- The concept of Preservation Objectives has been introduced to allow “Independently Understandable” to be more consistently testable.
- Consistency with the Producer-Archive Interface Specification (PAIS) (CCSDS 651.1-B-1) has been improved.
- Diagram conventions have been clarified.
- Some definitions in the Glossary have been clarified.
- Consistency between the diagrams of the Functional Entities and supporting text has been improved.
- A Preservation Watch function has been added to the Preservation Planning Functional Entity.
- The definition of the Information Package has been updated for consistency.
- Additional preservation techniques have been described explicitly in addition to Migration.
- Additional types of Archive interaction have been added, including primary-supporting Archives.
- Annex A is marked as Informative. It had previously erroneously been marked as Normative.
Annex B from the previous issue described the relationship of OAIS to other standards; but its contents were continually out of date as those other standards develop along different directions and timelines as compared to OAIS development. Also, subsection 1.5 from the previous issue, which provided a roadmap to related Standards which could be developed was removed since a number of those standards are now available. Both have been replaced by pointers in annex B to informative documents on the CCSDS web site which can be updated more rapidly.
These repeated intensive, collaborative, international discussions and reviews have led to a very broadly applicable, well thought through standard.