1. FOCUS – A Scalable and Extensible Digital Format Registry Principal Investigator: Joseph JaJa Graduate Students: Sang Song and Muluwork Geremew Lead Programmers: Mike Smorul and Mike McGann Institute for Advanced Computer Studies University of Maryland, College Park

2. Format Obsolescence Handling of digital formats is an essential part of long-term preservation Preservation of any object must include ways to render and transform the object if necessary. Needs to preserve Different essential aspects of objects. Tools for capturing the essential format characteristics of information stored as digital objects.

3. FOCUS: FOrmat CUration Service Maintains persistent information on digital formats and applications to access and manipulate them. Accessible either Directly through LDAP Or indirectly through SOAP (Web Services) Web Service Agent Format Registry LDAP SOAP

4. FOCUS on LDAP/SOAP Interoperability LDAP and SOAP provide the standard models and protocols, being platform independent. Scalability LDAP is a proven scalable technology. LDAP schema can be extended and server can be replicated with ease. SOAP server side can be extended without affecting client sides. Security SOAP can be on top of SSL (https). LDAP also provides its own secure authentication and authorization methods.

5. FOCUS Data Model dc=umiacs, dc=umd, dc=edu ou=Format- Registry ou=Applications Adobe Acrobat v6.0 Adobe Photoshop v7.0 Jhove 1.0 ou=Formats Adobe PDF v1.4 CompuServ GIF 1989a JPEG Image Format 2000  General descriptive properties.  Processing: rendering, editing, conversion and validation services/systems.  General descriptive properties.  Processing : format taken as input and/or output.

6. Validation Service Conversio n Service Web Service Agent Identificatio n Service Rendering Service Rendering Service FOCUS Service Model Format Registry Identifies format of a specific DO using the internal signature Determines a verification service to verify the format of a specific DO Identifies current rendering conditions for specific digital format. Locates transformation services to convert DO from source format to format of interest.