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Abstract

Authenticity is among digital document security properties needing attention. Literature focused on preservation reveals uncertainty - even confusion - about what we might mean by authentic. The current article provides a definition that spans vernacular usage of "authentic", ranging from digital documents through material artifacts to natural objects. We accomplish this by modeling entity transmission through time and space by signal sequences and object representations at way stations, and by carefully distinguishing objective facts from subjective values and opinions. Our model can be used to clarify other words that denote information quality, such as "evidence", "essential", and "useful". Digital documents are becoming important in most kinds of human activity. Whenever we buy something valuable, agree to a contract, design and build a machine, or provide a service, we should understand exactly what we intend and be ready to describe this as accurately as the occasion demands. This makes worthwhile whatever care is needed to devise definitions that are sufficiently precise and distinct from each other to explain what we are doing and to minimize community confusion. When we set out, some months ago, to describe answers to the open technical challenges of digital preservation, we took for granted the existence of a broad, unambiguous definition for authentic. Document authenticity is of fundamental importance not only for scholarly work, but also for practical affairs, including legal matters, regulatory requirements, military and other governmental information, and financial transactions. Trust, and evidence for deciding what can be trusted as authentic are considered in many works about digital preservation. These topics are broad, deep, and subtle, raising many questions. Among these, the current work addresses a single question, "What is a useful meaning of authentic or of authenticity for digital documents - a meaning that is not itself a source of confusion?" Progress in managing digital information would be hampered without a clear answer that is sufficiently objective to guide the evaluation of communication and computing technology. Our approach to constructing an answer to this question is to break each object transmission into pieces whose treatment we can describe explicitly and with attention to potential imperfections.