[DDI-users] When the Author of a DDI isn't the Archive

[Mark R. Diggory]

Hello DDI community,

I'm working on a project for the VDC right now which I could use some 
advice.

In a DDI the "docDscr" section is reserved for both the Author to 
describe bibliographic information about the DDI-compliant document 
itself as a whole (producer) and for the archive to describe the 
document in their system (archive).

I see often that tools use this to propagate information about the 
creation of the DDI (for instance Nesstar Publisher inserts info about 
the software used to author the document). In a VDC we do likewise, 
injecting a docDscr into any imported DDI content describing the 
Instance within our system.

My question is the following: When the Author of a DDI isn't the 
Archive, for instance, because it was produced external of the archive 
but imported into the archive, should the Archive insert a DocDscr of 
its own as well? Should it preserve the original docDscrs? These may 
seem mundane or obvious questions, but there isn't any real policy 
suggesting such.

In the case that we simply maintain docDscr for each, they can be 
separated conceptually by their source="archive|producer". Is this 
enough to maintain separate distinction? Is this enough to maintain 
provenance? What if there are other other archival docDscrs present, is 
there a policy for their preservation? How do we reuse them in our 
system to maintain the provenance chain?

Finally, when attempting to document a chain of provenance on the study, 
such information is very important. Not only am I referring to the path 
this instance took to get into my archive, but also important 
Acknowledgment, Access and  Usage policies which the originators would 
require to be enforced by my archive. While its interesting to preserve 
these things, its extremely difficult to use them for machine actionable 
purposes. My challenge to the group is how do we support such "machine 
actionable" capabilities in such a case. In my opinion, this is an area 
that the DDI is very weak in functioning. What are your experiences with 
using the docDscr to really maintain archival information that is useful 
by our systems?

Looking forward to you opinion on the subject,
-Mark