In some cases it may be desirable for a data owner to remove all their content from the system, however this use case conflicts with the general premise of DataONE to preserve information. A useful compromise may be to expunge content that has no known references to it.
There may be situations where content removal may be necessary for system or community integrity - for example if content uploaded to the system is determined to contain dangerous content such as viruses, the data owner is discovered to have committed fraud, or the content may be protected and must be removed for legal reasons.
In any case, it would seem that a data manager or curator should be involved in such decisions.
Figure 1. Interactions for use case 23, User can find out where all copies of my data are in the system andncan expunge them
Notes