iPres 2009: van Horik on MIXED framework for curation of file formats

Scholars in the Netherlands can deposit or search information in a repository system called DANS EASY, containing about 500,000 files, with a wide diversity of formats. How do I deal with a file called cars.DBF, now an obsolete format. There system can read such formats and convert them to the XML-based MIXED format, which identifies the data type and contains information on structure and content. So this was a smart conversion from the binary, obsolete dbase file to an XML reusable file. In the future it can be converted from this format to a current format of choice. This process (allegedly) does not require multiple migrations…

They have a SDFP community model for spreadsheet and tabular data. Have created some code for DBF and DataPerfect formats that they had to reverse engineer, in SourceForge; this a very labour-intensive activity, and really should be a community effort.

Question: does reverse engineering expose to risk? Don’t know…