Glossary
- Assessment** - The process of determining the level of //acceptability// of a digital object for a specific purpose on the basis of locally-defined policy rules.
- Characterization** - (1) Information //about// a digital object that describes its character or significant nature that can function as an //surrogate// for the object itself for purposes of much preservation analysis and decision making. (2) The process of deriving this information. This process has four important aspects: //identification//, //feature extraction//, //validation//, and //assessment//.
- Identification** - The process of determining the presumptive //format// of a digital object on the basis of suggestive extrinsic hints (e.g. HTTP content-type header) and intrinsic signatures, both internal (e.g. magic number) and external (e.g. file extension). Ideally, format identification should be reported in terms of a level of confidence.
- Feature extraction** - The process of reporting the intrinsic //properties// of a digital object significant to preservation planning and action.
- Format** - A set of syntactic and semantic rules for encoding abstract information content into sequences of bits. Many formats can be grouped into loose categories, or //families//, sharing a general set of encoding rules that are further restricted or extended for the specific format or //profile//. A format version is considered a profile.
- Parsing** - The syntax-directed reading of a digital object's bit streams to retrieve the set of lexical tokens that encode that object's meaning.
- Reportable unit** - The //logical// object of characterization. Given //N// source units, the number of reportable units will be ³ //N//. Each file is, by definition, a reportable unit, but proper subsets of files and aggregations of files may also constitute reportable units.
- Source unit** - A named file-like entity (or directory of such entities) passed to an invocation of JHOVE2 for characterization. The characterization of a directory entails the recursive traversal and characterization of each subsidiary file and sub-directory. Files must exist in a locally-attached file system, be network accessible by an http scheme URL, or be readable through a programmatic interface.
- Validation** - The process of determining the level of conformance of a digital object to the normative syntactic and semantic rules defined by the authoritative specification of the object's //format//.