Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
OTHER
DICTIONARY
OTHER DDL
DESCRIPTION
FITS FILE
DDL
DESCRIPTION
FITS
STANDARD
FITS
DICTIONARY
OTHER
DICTIONARY
SPECIFICATION
OTHER DDL
DEFINITION
FITS JAVA
SOFTWARE
PDF
STANDARD
DICTIONARY
SPECIFICATION
DDL
DEFINITION
DDL
SOFTWARE
JAVA VM
PDF
SOFTWARE
XML
SPECIFICATION
Original digital
object plus data
description
Data description for
transformed digital
object
UNICODE
SPECIFICATION
Generic
transformation
software
Transformed
digital object
Fig. 9.3
Using a generic application to transform from one encoding to another
information in the digitally encoded information. Authenticity evidence should
of course be provided by someone, providing values and other information
about selected Transformational Information Properties (also known as
Significant
Properties
), as discussed in
Sect. 13.6
.
9.2.2 Interfacing
A related but alternative way of using the digital object in one's preferred software
is to use or create an appropriate programming interface. Whether or not this is pos-
sible depends upon the flexibility of that preferred software - for example whether
or not it is possible to use plug-ins.
Instead of transforming the digital object as a whole one essentially does it on the
fly, treating only the piece that is needed. The advantage is that one might be dealing
with an object of many gigabytes, perhaps, in the case of scientific information,
many terabytes (1 terabyte
1,024 gigabytes) or even more. If one is only interested
in a small part of the information then transforming the whole digital object may be
a waste of effort. Being able to transform only the part that is needed can be a
great saving in computation time and temporary disk storage in such circumstances.
=
