Why LOTAR?


Legal & Business Motivation

Meeting the legal and business requirements of the aerospace and defense industry

The LOTAR project has been initiated to provide solutions for the legal and business requirements in the context of digital product information preservation within the aerospace and defense industry.

Legal and Business Requirements

Laws, their applicability and their interpretation vary from country to country, and are most likely to change over the period of time when the prEN9300 standard is used. prEN9300 considers requirements coming from legal and certification rules and regulations on long term archiving of technical documentation. The standard defines architecture, processes and data formats to fulfill these requirements. It does not provide means for the proof of digital technical documentation in cases of action on law or for certification.

Different legal and certification rules exist worldwide and they have been not completely harmonized in Europe. There are still different rules of various airworthiness authorities. Additional to the general legal demands, there are aerospace industry established standards, company specific rules and recommendations regarding documentation and archiving of digital documents.

The duration of retention differs for the different types of documents.

In general it can be said, that keeping of documents for the future have to take place in such a way that they are usable mainly for the proof of:

  • Legal and certification constraints
  • Contractual constraints
  • Re-use of data belonging information
  • Manufacturing processes
  • Modifications on products and documents