Tag: File Formats (page 2)
Making DROID work with Wikidata
Wikidata is a good service, Wikibase (on which Wikidata is built) is a better platform.
I have spoken before about its potential to be added into the file-format registry ecosystem in a federated model.
If we are to use it as a registry that can perhaps complement the pipelines going into PRONOM, e.g. in vendor’s digital preservation platforms such as the Rosetta Format Library, a Wikidata should be able to output different serializations of signature file for tools such as Siegfried, DROID or FIDO.
- Siegfried ✅: https://github.com/richardlehane/siegfried/wiki/Wikidata-identifier
- Fido ❌: I’ll need to revisit this!
And what about DROID?
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We love our fiefdoms: The DPC and Wikidata
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Demystify-lite is upgraded and demystify 2.0.0 is finally here!
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PRONOM release statistics
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A rough guide to digital preservation metadata
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Shattering the eyeglass: Using Kaitai Structs to dissect the eyeglass’ contents
In my post from 2012: Genesis of a File Format, I created a new file format – the Eyeglass file format. The format provides a mechanism to persist information about a patient’s eye health following a checkup at an opticians. Today in 2023 we can use the format to understand how to make use of Kaitai Structs for understanding file formats.
Given the disclaimer that I am not actually an optician and that the format is purely illustrative, let’s look at the eyeglass again below.
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Moonshine: a small part of the file format analyst’s toolkit
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Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried
In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried, the file format identification tool. I don’t think I’ve talked about that work on here before but you can find links to my iPRES talk on my ORCID page.
Let’s look at the abstract and the content of the talk below.
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What information is in a file format identification report?
In early 2022, I was finally able to get around to writing a paper that I had been thinking about for the better part of a decade. The paper, “Fractal in Detail: What Information Is in a File Format Identification Report?” was published in the Code4Lib journal Issue 53.
The paper takes a deep dive into the fractal contents of file format identification reports exported from tools like Siegfried and DROID.
Let’s take a brief look the article and its contents below.
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