File Information Tool Set (FITS)

What is it?

The File Information Tool Set (FITS) identifies, validates, and extracts technical metadata for various file formats. It wraps several third-party open source tools, normalizes and consolidates their output, and reports any errors.

The current tools used are:

• Jhove (LGPL version 2.1 or any later version)
• Exiftool (GPL version 1 or any later version; or the artistic license)
• National Library of New Zealand Metadata Extractor (Apache Public License version 2)
• DROID (BSD version 3.0)
• FFIdent (LGPL)
• Note that the live site for ffident (http://schmidt.devlib.org/ffident/index.html) seems to have disappeared - we are now linking to Internet Archive's version of the ffident website.
• File Utility (windows) (revised BSD)

The source code for each of the above tools is available on their websites. The source code for FITS is included in the downloadable ZIP file.

FITS also supplies two original tools: FileInfo and XmlMetadata.

To get started see the FITS User Guide.

Changes:

• Version 0.3.1 (02/01/10)

- Fixed error when trying to convert FITS output to a standard metadata schema for a file that does not have sufficient output that can be converted ( issue #6 )

- Fixed bugs in FitsOutput

- Added patch from beerchr1 to add basic video support ( issue #7 )

• Version 0.3.0 (01/14/10)

- Added API support for converting output to MIX, TextMD and DocumentMD

- Added command line support (-x) for outputting MIX, TextMD or DocumentMD

- Updated NLNZ, Jhove, and Exiftool output values to be compatible with MIX

- Added API feature ( issue #4 ) to disable individual tools

- Updated Jhove to version 1.5

- Using byteoffset=true option for Jhove TIFF module

- Fixed  issue #3 : using relative path instead of $FITS_HOME/path in xml/nlnz/config.xml & in XSLT when for xml/fits_output.xsd

- Fixed  issue #5 : FITS 0.2.6 output file showing FITS version as 0.2.5

• Version 0.2.6

- Fixed bug that was causing external identification information to be dropped from the output.

• Version 0.2.5

- initial release