Page History

From 2006-2011, this work was supported as part of "Innovative Systems and Software: Applications to NARA Research Problems", a Cooperative Agreement between the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Intellectual Merit

NCSA's goals for the "Investigation of Data Representation" task focused in three areas: developing an open-source parser for DFDL with an emphasis on enhancing performance and scalability, integration of DFDL/Defuddle into the SHAMAN preservation architecture, and exploration of practical applications of DFDL and the development of a library of DFDL descriptions.

Intellectual Merit

Preservation can be thought of as communication with the future. The records we preserve today need to be accessible and displayable by future technology. Beyond maintaining the accessibility of the raw bits of the digital data, preservation requires maintaining an ability to interpret the data as meaningful structures, relationships, and visual representations.

...

1. McGrath, R.E., J. Kastner, A. Rodriguez, and J. Myers. ``Defuddle: a Tool for Format Translation and Metadata Extraction (Poster)''. Microsoft E-science Workshop (2009).
2. McGrath, R.E., J. Kastner, A. Rodriguez, and J. Myers. ``Experiments in Data Format Interoperation Using Defuddle'', National Center for Supercomputing Applications, June, 2009, http://cet.ncsa.illinois.edu/publications/Data_Interoperation.pdf
3. McGrath, R.E., J. Kastner, A. Rodriguez, and J. Myers. ``Towards a Semantic Preservation System'', National Center for Supercomputing Applications, June, 2009, http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.3152.
4. Rodriguez, A. and R. E. McGrath, ``Some Notes of comparison between DFDL and Defuddle''. National Center for Supercomputing Applications, October, 2010.
5. Rodriguez, Alejandro and Robert E. McGrath, ``Daffodil: A New DFDL Parser''. National Center for Supercomputing Applications, October, 2010
6. Talbott, T. D., K. L. Schuchardt, E, G. Stephan, and J, D. Myers, ``Mapping Physical Formats to Logical Models to Extract Data and metadata: The Defuddle Parsing Engine'', International Provenance and Annotation Workshop. 2006, Springer: Heidelberg. p. 73-81.
7. wikipedia, "Data Format Description Language". 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Format_Description_Language.
8. Powell, Alan W, Michael J Beckerle, and Stephen M Hanson, Data Format Description Language (DFDL) v1.0 Specification. GFD-P-R.174, Open Grid Forum, 2011. http://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.174.pdf

...

Related Links

• OGF Standards: Data Format Description Language (DFDL), http://www.ogf.org/dfdl/.
• The Open Grid Foundation Data Format Description Language WG (DFDL-WG), http://forge.gridforum.org/projects/dfdl-wg/.
• wikipedia, "Data Format Description Language". 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Format_Description_Language.
• Defuddle (Old) Examples and code: http://sourceforge.net/projects/defuddle.