The PRONOM archive and (archive) of the skeleton test suite is no longer maintained. The experiment was to create a record of the of Raw data that went into PRONOM (the file format registry) for future research purposes.
Rather than just storing the data and leaving it, handles were minted in Zenodo to provide an anchor for researchers to point back to. This made the workflow a bit more difficult to do by hand and it has been hard to keep up with the pace of publication with PRONOM.
Also, the reality is, I don't think digital preservation researchers actually care about this data and I don't anticipate PRONOM creating a historical interface allowing it to be viewed, filling in a gap in a historical audit trail for the system.
Most research projects looking at the change in file format signatures over the years have focused on the DROID signature file. This makes sense because the DROID signature file actually triggers file format identification and so it can be measured against something, i.e. something being identified vs. not being identified.
Anecdotally, I believe the DROID export has historically encoded PRONOM data with slight variations to the recorded signature. Richard Lehane can shed more light on these minor divergances through his work on Siegfried.
Fortunately, the weight of maintaining a PRONOM record was not entirely on this repository's shoulders. Richard has also been maintaining somewhat of a PRONOM record through his builder utility.
Builder's record goes back to PRONOM v92 and the raw PRONOM data can be accessed via the tool's release pages: here.
To that end, between this repository going back to v70 and Builder starting at v92, should any researcher want to come back to the historical record of PRONOM, they can build a pretty decent picture going back to 2013.
Generating a skeleton test suite will still be possible and that code will continue to be maintained as its benefit to signature and tool development. You can read more about the skeleton suite generator work below.
Herein lies a tool for the automated generation of digital objects based on the digital signatures documented in the PRONOM database maintained by The National Archives, UK: PRONOM Data is licensed under the Open Government Licence (OGL).
The skeleton-test-suite-generator serves to fill the gap that exists whereby the community requires a corpus of digital objects for the validation and evaluation of format identification tools and techniques. The tool should be used to complement a methodology whereby skeleton files are also generated manually by signature developers.
The research paper this work led to can be found on the IJDC website.
Each PRONOM release now has a DOI provided by the Skeleton Suite. This will help academics referencing versions of PRONOM but more importantly will help preservation of this record.
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v97
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v96
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v95
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v94
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v93
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v92
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v91
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v90
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v89
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v88
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v86
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v85
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v84
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v83
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v82
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v81
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v79
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v78
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v77
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v75
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v74
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v73
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v72
Skeleton Test Suite and PRONOM Archive v70
Code to generate the container, and standard skeleton suites can be found:
- github.com/exponential-decay/skeleton-test-suite-generator
- github.com/exponential-decay/skeleton-container-test-suite-generator
I completed two reports on the Skeleton Test Suite back in 2012/2013. They document testing of the files on DROID and explore reasons why some files do or do not work. The reports and links to the test-suites used for testing can be found on the repository wiki, here: Skeleton-reports.
More information can be found on my blog: More information.
- Siegfried 1.0 released.
- Introduction to Siegfried.
- Automation in Digital Preservation.
- Skeleton suite's contribution to PRONOM v92.
- PRONOM in practice.
- addtext (adding missing file extensions using PRONOM data).
Copyright (c) 2015 Ross Spencer
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