PRONOM Signature Development Utility

Description
Utility to enable the creation of DROID compatible signature files using PRONOM regular expression syntax. The tool outputs in an XML format compatible with DROID 4 upwards (including DROID 5 and 6). Three sequences can be combined to create a single file format signature. Signature files can be concatenated manually if more complex collections are required for testing.

Signature File 88 contains of 1427 different PUIDs.

DROID
The signature development utility output can be directly uploaded to DROID via its 'Install Signature File' mechanism. Be sure to then select the new file from 'Preferences'.

Siegfried
Siegfried is a useful tool for testing because it can combine a new signature file from this utility with all the other signatures in the PRONOM corpus, plus its many others.

Instructions for Linux
We use a utility called Roy to extend signature files. This is installed alongside Siegfried.

To extend a signature file to include a custom signature file, we need to make sure that there is a 'custom' folder, where Roy can find it. We will need our signature to be on a path that looks as follows:

/home/{username}/siegfried/custom/{custom-dev-sig}.xml

Extending the signature file can then be completed in two stages:

1) Roy harvest

This will download PRONOM signature file reports. This is the most accurate way to run Siegfried. An alternative is to let Siegfried parse the DROID signature file, but this has shown to lead to some inconsistencies where PRONOM and DROID do not reflect each other entirely.

2) Roy build -extend {custom-dev-sig}.xml

Try Siegfried on a single file of the format we have created the signature for:

3) sf {custom-dev-format}.{ext}

The result will be:

--- siegfried  : 1.7.6 scandate   : 2017-10-25T23:35:31+13:00 signature  : default.sig created    : 2017-10-25T23:23:59+13:00 identifiers : - name   : 'pronom' details : 'DROID_SignatureFile_V91.xml; container-signature-20170330.xml; extensions: {custom-dev-sig}.xml' --- filename : '{custom-dev-format}.{ext}' filesize : 1492992 modified : 2017-10-22T16:02:13+13:00 errors  : matches : - ns     : 'pronom' id     : 'dev/1' format : '{custom-dev-format}' version : '1.0' mime   : 'application/{custom-dev-format}' basis  : 'extension match img; byte match at 1024, 32' warning :

User Experiences

 * Jenny Mitcham creates her first signature using the Signature Development Utility
 * Andrea K. Byrne creates her first signature using the Signature Development Utility

Development Activity
All development activity is visible on GitHub: https://github.com/exponential-decay/signature-development-utility/commits

Activity Feed
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