Category Archives: News

P2 registry

Posted on October 7, 2009 | Comments Off on P2 registry

I’ve just come across yet another file format registry: the P2 Registry at the University of Southampton in the UK. It’s identified as a beta and was pretty slow when I tried it, but it has some interesting features, including risk assessments of formats. PRONOM and other data sources are used. There is a short PDF article on the aims of P2, which tells us that “the key feature of the registry is the ability to import arbitrary ontologies that can be used both to infer new facts from existing information as well as to align (in the case where two concepts are similar or the same in nature) information already in the registry.”

Its web user interface is minimal at the moment, but it’s worth keeping an eye on this.

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Planets digital preservation conference

Posted on September 28, 2009 | Comments Off on Planets digital preservation conference

The Planets project will host a three-day training event on digital preservation in Bern, Switzerland, on November 17-19, 2009. According to the announcement: “Day 1 will consider the case for preserving digital objects, the technical issues involved, and the Planets framework, tools and services. On days 2 and 3 delegates will gain hands-on experience of working with Planets and a scenario (sample collection) to develop a preservation plan and preserve digital objects.”

Day 1 is recommended for “Heads of IT, Curation and Preservation, CEOs and preservation/curation/IT staff.” Days 2-3 are recommended for “digital preservation staff (e.g. librarians, archivists, digital librarians and archivists, repository managers, software developers, policy managers etc.).”

Attendance is limited.

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HTML 5 updated

Posted on August 28, 2009 | Comments Off on HTML 5 updated

There’s a new working draft of HTML 5 available from W3C. It still has the same warning as in April: “Implementors should be aware that this specification is not stable. Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways.”

But lots of sections have been marked “Last call for comments,” so perhaps it really is closing in on a stable version. Or perhaps not. The most widely debated issue is video codecs, and I get the impression there’s been little progress on them. The situation is, in principle, similar to the <IMG> tag, where browsers explicitly aren’t required to support any particular image format; but it would be a poor (or text-only) browser that didn’t support JPEG and GIF, at least. With video there isn’t even that much agreement. Granted, the situation is just as bad now, but HTML 4 doesn’t even address the issue, so it isn’t held back by format disputes.

I’m looking at the HTML 5 wars from a rather uninformed distance, so don’t expect expert analysis here, just impatience with how slowly things are going. According to the WHATWG Wiki, it may reach Candidate Recommendation stage in 2012. The fact that the HTML working group now has three co-chairs just strikes me as a bad sign.

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FITS — a new tool set from HUL

Posted on August 10, 2009 | Comments Off on FITS — a new tool set from HUL

An early version of FITS, a new tool set for identifying, validating, and extracting technical metadata for various file formats, is now available on Googlecode. It wraps several third-party open source tools, normalizes and consolidates their output, and reports any errors.

I’m not directly involved in FITS at the moment, but I’m involved in various ways around its edges.

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Catching up

Posted on August 9, 2009 | Comments Off on Catching up

Here are a few of the news items I mentioned recently on the old blog, for your convenience:

  • A workshop on JHOVE2 will be held after the conclusion of iPres 2009 in San Francisco, on October 7, 2009. This will include, for the first time, a presentation of the prototype code.
  • JPEG XR, formerly known as Microsoft HD Photo, is now an international standard, as reported in a JPEG press release.
  • JHOVE 1.4 is now available on SourceForge. The main change is that PDF/A compliance is more accurately identified than before, and is based on the final standard rather than a draft.

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