Data has always been a critical asset to manufacturing. Increasingly, data is in digital form with no corresponding analog equivalent. For example, 3D digital models have become the preferred method for specifying designs in the transportation sector. With product life cycles often far longer (i.e., aircraft fifty years) than the expected lifetime of a manufacturing software application used to interpret the data (approximately three years) or of the technologies used to store and retrieve the data (approximately ten years), searching for archived information is routinely problematic.

Data access, retrieval, and reuse is necessary for such information-based activities as initial manufacturing, design reuse, liability and legal issues, incident investigation, and regulatory and contractual compliance.  Current practices include converting the 3D models to 2D, and archiving the result on microfiche; migrating data off storage systems before they become obsolete and/or unreliable; and maintaining legacy hardware and software for the sole purpose of accessing old data. These practices are expensive, labor-intensive, and still result in a loss of information over time.

For more information on what NIST is doing to mitigate current expensive practices, and maximize data access and reuse, contact Josh Lubell. You may also like to preview the Government Computer News article entitled, "Modern Relics - NIST and others work on how to preserve data for later use."