Large-Scale, Transparent Format Migration System

Valizada, Isgandar Large-Scale, Transparent Format Migration System., 2011 Master Thesis thesis, University of Freiburg, Germany. [Thesis]

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English abstract

An important challenge in digital preservation is the problem of data format obsolescence. The digital objects eventually become inaccessible when the applications, which were properly interpreting their formats, cease to exist. Preserving these applications is an important step in solving above-mentioned problem. However, in order to enable the usage of the objects over time by newly developed tools, the objects must be periodically converted to more spread out formats. The work in this thesis is dedicated to the design of an easily extendible, transparent and large-scale oriented system which is able to perform such conversions. The system was designed as part of an existing digital preservation framework in order to enrich the framework with its migration functionality. The interactive session replaying was chosen as the main approach in performing format conversions. According to this approach, the conversion process is carried out by computer interaction with the graphical user interface of the original, format-native applications. Their capability of exporting the loaded digital objects in a format other than their initial format is used. The order and nature of the input events necessary for this task are acquired once from the corresponding manual human interaction. The input events are then reproduced under the same or similar conditions for arbitrary digital objects subject to the same source-to-target format conversion. The work in this thesis presents the structure of the system in general and focuses on the components responsible for the actual conversion. A prototype application has been developed and deployed in an existing digital preservation framework. During the experiments it has shown successful results when converting digital objects in a completely unattended way.

Item type:	Thesis (UNSPECIFIED)
Keywords:	Digital Preservation, Format Migration, Migration by Emulation, Interactive Session Recording/Replaying
Subjects:	J. Technical services in libraries, archives, museum. J. Technical services in libraries, archives, museum. > JH. Digital preservation.
Depositing user:	Isgandar Valizada
Date deposited:	01 Sep 2011
Last modified:	02 Oct 2014 12:20
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/10760/16073

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