All projects

Producer Archive-Workflow Network (PAWN)

A mature software platform that is extremely flexible in implementing centralized and distributed ingestion and processing workflows. It is built on an infrastructure-independent scalable, secure, and reliable architecture. Specifically, PAWN was able to demonstrate the following capabilities

• Approval and signature gathering that can be customized depending on ingest requirements of a record schedule
• A mechanism to allow users to have customizable roles rather than locking users into predefined roles.
• Show how to present Record Schedules to end users through easy to understand templates.
• Allow automated and manual process chains to be defined and executed on data in PAWN. In addition, allow these chains to be customized depending on record set and template requirements.

Audit Control Environment (ACE)

ACE (Auditing Control Environment) is a prototype system that incorporates a new methodology to address the integrity of long term archives using rigorous cryptographic techniques. ACE continuously audits the contents of the various objects according to the policy set by the archive, and provides mechanisms for an independent third-party auditor to certify the integrity of any object.

Our approach will allow an independent auditor to verify the integrity of every version of an archived digital object as well as link the current version to the original form of the object when it was ingested into the archive. Also, ACE is very cost effective and scalable while making no assumptions about the archive architecture.

Web Archiving

Format Curation Service (FOCUS)

Rapid development in software industry has given birth to an enormous number of file formats. Deciding which file format a certain file belongs to is not a trivial matter anymore. Although the extension of a file, such as '.doc', '.pdf' or '.xls' on Windows, could give a nice hint for its actual file format, sometimes one could be faced with less known extensions like '.skl' or '.pdz', or even no extension at all.

The file extension can be very misleading too. Even though a file can have a familiar extension, it does not necessarily mean that the file is of the familiar format. For example, the '.pdf' extension can be any of the followings: Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format, Analyser Protocol Definition, ESRI ArcView Preferences Definition File, Netware Printer Definition File, P-CAD Database Interchange Format, Microsoft Package Definition File, or Corel Ventura Publisher EPS-variation Page. In this case, having '.pdf' as an extension could be worse than not having anything at all in the end. In order to make certain of a file format, the only perfect, but impratical of course, way would be openning up the file with every possible application in the world.

Thus, this framework for the file format identification intends to provide an easier way to help identify a file format. Although it might not be 100% precise, it aims to be as accurate as possible with a minimum amount of time to have the final result back.

Storage Resource Broker Utilities

A set of java-based utilities has been created to assist development of preservation tools on the SRB.

Certificate Authority

A standalone, tomcat based CA used to easily create pkcs12 keystores for use in securing web services.