We love our fiefdoms: The DPC and Wikidata
Andy Jackson is doing some positive work for the DPC, especially in his low-level look at Wikidata recently (external blog).…
Tag: File Formats (page 2)
Demystify-lite is upgraded and demystify 2.0.0 is finally here!
Demystify-lite and Demystify 2.0.0 have been released featuring the denylist for the first time, plus some bonus features! With thanks…
PRONOM release statistics
My contribution to PRONOM research week 2023 (held in November 2023) is a PRONOM summary website and Application Programming Interface…
A rough guide to digital preservation metadata
A rough guide to metadata I published on Twitter once upon day and again in Content-disposition: Archival – Repatriating Dates…
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.
Moonshine: a small part of the file format analyst’s toolkit
Today I released Moonshine 2.0.0. Moonshine is a a file format discovery tool I developed a few years ago. A…
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.
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.
Digital Preservation Risk analysis, Uncertainty, and Digital File Format Obsolescence (European Conference on Digital Archives (2010))
Full paper: The application of risk models to digital file format obsolescence I have seen a lot of conversation about…
![Vincent van Gogh [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://exponentialdecay.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/skull-with-a-burning-cigarette-150x150.jpg)
The Problem With… Comprehensive Test Suites. Lessons Learned During The Development Of The Skeleton Test Corpus
I managed to attend the International Digital Curation Conference in Amsterdam last week. It was a useful conference to present…