RiskAnalysisTesting

From PreservWiki

As part of the new classification service the ability to display risk levels pertaining to the files was also built in. This was designed to conform to the newer APIs being constructed as part of the on going developments of PRONOM.

Screen shots of the interface designed to display these scores can be found on the EPrintsPreservation page.

In order to test the code which links our EPrints 3.2 repositories to the at the time unavailable Risk Analysis API a piece of stub code was written to emulate the server functionality at the most simple level. The stub code along with instructions on how to use the Risk Analysis API can be found on the PronomStubCode page.

In all testing with the stub code, risk scores were obtained successfully and in good time, leading to a fully working page in EPrints on which file format summaries and related (although made up) risk scores were displayed. Again the screenshots of this part of the process can be found on the EPrintsPreservation page.

The Live Risk Analysis Service

Preserv2 is please to announce that the live service providing risk scores was made available in early March 2009.

Although this was very near the end of the project, using the stub code to emulate the actual service meant that all that had to happen to was to re-point the service to the live version of PRONOM and test this. The following 2 minor changes were needed to make the risk analysis module in EPrints work with the new service.

1) PRONOM does not support the <method> tag in SOAP calls and thus it is harder to construct valid calls for PRONOM with some SOAP libraries. The one in use here was SOAP::Lite in Perl.

2) If there is no risk score available PRONOM returns a value of 0, this was unknown before this point and also worrying as 0 is the worst high risk score. In PRONOM the higher the score the lesser the risk, thus having 0 returned for no classification is not the most ideal outcome. As a result of this the page which displays the final breakdown had to be updated to display this properly.

Note: At the time of testing there were no risk scores available in PRONOM thus every format returns a 0.

A Screenshot of the EPrints admin page with risk scores sourced from the live service can be seen | here