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The PERICLES Extraction Tool

The PET tool is a tool we created in the PERICLES EU project http://www.pericles-project.eu/ to capture Significant Environment Information from live environments, to support better object use and reuse, in the scope of long term preservation of data. The tool is developed by Fabio Corubolo (ULIV) and Anna Eggers (UGOE) and it’s an entirely new development for the PERICLES project.

We want to collect important environment information that could be lost if not gathered at the right time, from the context of use of the data. PET implements various information extraction techniques as plug-in Extraction Modules, as complete implementations or where possible by re-using already existing external tools and libraries. Environment monitoring is supported by specialized monitoring daemons and continuous extraction of relevant information triggered by environment events related to the creation and alteration of digital objects, like, e.g., the alteration of an observed file or directory, opening or closing a specific file, and other system calls.

The tool can be used in a sheer curation scenario, running in the system background under the full control of - but without disrupting - the user. Furthermore a snapshot extraction mode exists for capturing the current state of the environment, which is mainly designed to extract information that doesn't change frequently, as e.g. system resource specifications.

A general scenario for PET capture is described here: The overall objectives that we want to accomplish, each of which depends on the previous one, are:

1. Use the PET tool to collect environment information when the DOs are used, based on specific profiles

2. Analyse the information collected to infer new relationships between digital objects

3. Assign values to the dependencies based on the purpose and significance (significance weights)

The current implementation of the PET tool covers the 1st objective, and starts to address the second.

PET features

The following list outlines the main features of the PET tool:

• Extracts information that is usually ignored by current metadata extractors.
• The extracted environment information from outside the digital object for re-use possibilities.
• Extracts information at the right time and place: within the production environment
• Supports continuous extraction in a sheer curation scenario.
• Visualizes information change over time.
• Information snapshot extractions allow getting a quick overview of extractable information.
• Platform independent (needs Java 7).
• Modular and extendable architecture that supports specialized needs.
• Use profiles allow the parallel usage for different scenarios.
• Provides graphical user interface, but can also run without graphics in console mode.
• Provides exchangeable storage backend.
• Saves results in standardized format: JSON or XML.