The GRATE-R, originally developed for PLANETS, utilises the idea of performing
migration by interactive session replaying in emulated original environments.
According to this approach the format migration process is carried out by
computer interaction with the graphical user interface of the original,
format-native applications. Their capability of exporting the loaded digital
objects in a format other than their initial format is used. The order and
nature of the input events necessary for this task are acquired once from the
corresponding human interaction. The input events are then reproduced under the
same or similar conditions for arbitrary digital objects subject to the same
source-to-target migration.
In a next step a prototypical service for the PLANETS IF and testbed was
developed in the framework of a master thesis on the subject “Emulation
Workflows in Digital Preservation” at Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg
(http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/16073). On the code level it represents the implementation
of Migrate interface of Planets IF. Its compatibility with the Planets IF
allows it to be combined with the other preservation tools forming more
sophisticated workflows than only migration. The integration in the Planets
Testbed is present at our demo installation and accessible via Internet.
For the demonstration at the Hackathon we have prerecorded manual user sessions
performing the sample “WPD to RTF” (Word Perfect Document) and “SAM to
(PDF+TXT)” (AMI PRO to both PDF and text) migrations, which we will use for
unattended migrations of real DOs. If anyone has some meaningful sample files
to test, we would be glad to have them. We hope to make the demos accessible
for registered OPF members after the event.