Analysis of X.Y Task
Prerequisites and Assumptions
TSH, ABR, and JRG had a long discussion about how to implement Planets integration with the DOMS characterizer. We decided that the best solution would be to make new wrappings (inside the Planets code base) for tools Droid and Jhove. These wrappings should implement (for both Droid and Jhove) a characterise webservice, that will be called by the DOMS characterise module.
A major point of discussion regarded what Jhove and Droid should return when called with a file to characterise. Somewhere should be placed code to parse the Jhove/Droid output and decide on it. The discussion ended in choosing basically between two different solutions:
- Jhove and Droid wrapping webservices return only an output dump from the tools, and the DOMS characterise module takes care of parsing and deciding.
- Jhove and Droid wrapping webservices parse tool output and return a few properties that the DOMS characterise module decides on.
Advantages and disadvantages:
Advantages of 1:
Advantages of 2:
- Because of the same properties returned from the webservices, the DOMS characterizer would to a higher degree be unchanged for replaced/new Planets characterize-webservices.
- Tool-specifics are handled near the tool (each characterizing webservice).
Disadvantages of 1:
Disadvantages of 2:
- In choosing a specific properties-format in which to put certain information from the full characterization output dump, we may not foresee and include all the data which may some day be needed for e.g. searching files of specific types in DOMS. (This info would then have to be generated later, from the full characterization dumps which land on file objects in DOMS.)