File Format Identification (FFI) is a package for making sensible guesses about file formats from Url strings. FFI is structured as a package to clear the way for future improvements.
Copyright (C) 2017 Data Together
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software
Foundation, version 3.0.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
See the LICENSE file for details.
We would love involvement from more people! If you notice any errors or would like to submit changes, please see our Contributing Guidelines.
We use GitHub issues for tracking bugs and feature requests and Pull Requests (PRs) for submitting changes
Add ffi to any golang project with import "github.com/datatogether/ffi"
Technical documentation can be built with godoc . or, if your $GOPATH and repo
structure is set up correctly, with something like godoc -http=:6060 & followed by
browsing to http://localhost:6060/pkg/github.com/datatogether.
The biggest avenue for improvement may be through integration with PRONOM or File Information Tool Set from Harvard
PRONOM is a repository of file format signatures stored as XML. Currently the best tool for working with PRONOM is DROID, which is ill-suited to being run in web service oriented architectures.
As a suggested path for implementation, one could first focus on wrapping DROID in a service that invokes droid-cli with a given set of bytes. This would happen in a separate pacakge from this one. Later we could sit down & learn how to properly parse PRONOM xml signature files & do byte comparison, which could bue implemented in this package. Anyone investigating this avenue may wish to also review some of the work accomplished translating the PRONOM registry: http://the-fr.org
From the FITS project homepage:
The File Information Tool Set (FITS) identifies, validates and extracts technical metadata for a wide range of file formats. It acts as a wrapper, invoking and managing the output from several other open source tools. Output from these tools are converted into a common format, compared to one another and consolidated into a single XML output file. FITS is written in Java and is compatible with Java 1.7 or higher.