DROID (Digital Record Object Identification)

DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) is a software tool developed to perform automated batch identification of file formats.
Homepage:	http://digital-preservation.github.io/droid/
License:	BSD License
Platforms:	Java 6 Standard Edition
Appears in COW:	Abrdn Digital Preservation Workflow, Creating a SIP from content downloaded from OneDrive (or other Cloud based source), Digital archiving workflow (high-level), Ingest and AIP creation, LAC Pre-Ingest Workflow, Workflow for ingesting digitized books into a digital archive

Description

DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) is a software tool developed to perform automated batch identification of file formats. DROID is designed to meet the fundamental requirement of any digital repository to be able to identify the precise format of all stored digital objects, and to link that identification to a central registry of technical information about that format and its dependencies.

DROID uses the PRONOM signature files to perform format identification. Like PRONOM, it was developed by the National Archives of the UK. Written in Java, XML.

PRONOM

The format information held in PRONOM is what powers DROID (Digital Record Object Identification). Both are maintained by the UK's National Archives.

DROID downloads the latest signature files from PRONOM, and those are used to drive the identification process. See the PRONOM release notes.

A number of other tools and registries have been based around the PRONOM data. These include:

• Nanite and Fido identification tools

Although the information and website are made freely available under the Open Government License, the underlying software engine that powers PRONOM is proprietary.

The PRONOM Web API

The website is oriented towards manual browsing, but note that each PRONOM registry entry as a permalink, like this:

   http://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/fmt/579

and furthermore, by appending '.xml' to the URL for any entry, the data can be recovered as XML:

   http://apps.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom/fmt/579.xml

User Experiences

• Digital Asset Assessment Tool - Assessment of file format testing tools.
• Comparing how Apache Tika and DROID perform HTML identification: How much of the UK's HTML is valid?
• An Analysis Engine for the DROID CSV Export
• Used in KOST-Val for the file format identification. For performance and granularity reasons an own SignatureFile is used instead of the official PRONOM registry.