Open Planets Foundation

Fido is a simple format identification tool for digital objects that uses Pronom signatures. It converts signatures into regular expressions and applies them directly. Fido is free, Apache 2.0 licensed, easy to install, and runs on Windows and Linux.  Most importantly, Fido is very fast.

A couple of people have asked me if my experiments with Pronom and Fido would have been easier if Pronom had been available as RDF or LinkedData.  The short answer to this question is ‘no’.  Let me explain why.

Last time, I discussed Pronom and Droid. We had a quick look at the compiled (nearly unreadable) pattern information that the Droid signature file holds and the uncompiled (but still hard to read) representation that is stored in Pronom.

Pronom and Droid, developed primarily at the National Archives (TNA) of the United Kingdom, have been a key contribution to the digital preservation community. Pronom is a registry of information about file formats. The TNA provides access to the Pronom registry on-line at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM and maintains the information. Droid is a software application that uses some of the file format information to identify the type of specific digital objects.