Evaluating a Format for Viable, Long-Term Dynamic Data Archiving

This article reviews the various (and sometimes conflicting) issues involved in the development of a new flexible, open-definition file format. To help facilitate early evaluation of format function and performance, an intermediate pseudo-prototypical hybrid UFF-DSA (dynamic signal archive) format has been implemented. This evaluation format effectively encodes the UFF dataset record information in a XML format (similar to the draft DSA definition) and then stores the individual XML records as discrete entries in the DSA archive container (ZIP format). In addition, the resulting principal features necessary for viable long term archiving of data and results, together with an evaluation of an initial implementation of the design, are presented.