Petter Reinholdtsen

This morning, a new release of Nikita Noark 5 core project was announced on the project mailing list. The Nikita free software solution is an implementation of the Norwegian archive standard Noark 5 used by government offices in Norway. These were the changes in version 0.4 since version 0.3, see the email link above for links to a demo site:

• Roll out OData handling to all endpoints where applicable
• Changed the relation key for "ny-journalpost" to the official one.
• Better link generation on outgoing links.
• Tidy up code and make code and approaches more consistent throughout the codebase
• Update rels to be in compliance with updated version in the interface standard
• Avoid printing links on empty objects as they can't have links
• Small bug fixes and improvements
• Start moving generation of outgoing links to @Service layer so access control can be used when generating links
• Log exception that was being swallowed so it's traceable
• Fix name mapping problem
• Update templated printing so templated should only be printed if it is set true. Requires more work to roll out across entire application.
• Remove Record->DocumentObject as per domain model of n5v4
• Add ability to delete lists filtered with OData
• Return NO_CONTENT (204) on delete as per interface standard
• Introduce support for ConstraintViolationException exception
• Make Service classes extend NoarkService
• Make code base respect X-Forwarded-Host, X-Forwarded-Proto and X-Forwarded-Port
• Update CorrespondencePart* code to be more in line with Single Responsibility Principle
• Make package name follow directory structure
• Make sure Document number starts at 1, not 0
• Fix isues discovered by FindBugs
• Update from Date to ZonedDateTime
• Fix wrong tablename
• Introduce Service layer tests
• Improvements to CorrespondencePart
• Continued work on Class / Classificationsystem
• Fix feature where authors were stored as storageLocations
• Update HQL builder for OData
• Update OData search capability from webpage

If free and open standardized archiving API sound interesting to you, please contact us on IRC (#nikita on irc.freenode.net) or email (nikita-noark mailing list).

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

As part of my involvement in the work to standardise a REST based API for Noark 5, the Norwegian archiving standard, I spent some time the last few months to try to register a MIME type and PRONOM code for the SOSI file format. The background is that there is a set of formats approved for long term storage and archiving in Norway, and among these formats, SOSI is the only format missing a MIME type and PRONOM code.

What is SOSI, you might ask? To quote Wikipedia: SOSI is short for Samordnet Opplegg for Stedfestet Informasjon (literally "Coordinated Approach for Spatial Information", but more commonly expanded in English to Systematic Organization of Spatial Information). It is a text based file format for geo-spatial vector information used in Norway. Information about the SOSI format can be found in English from Wikipedia. The specification is available in Norwegian from the Norwegian mapping authority. The SOSI standard, which originated in the beginning of nineteen eighties, was the inspiration and formed the basis for the XML based Geography Markup Language.

I have so far written a pattern matching rule for the file(1) unix tool to recognize SOSI files, submitted a request to the PRONOM project to have a PRONOM ID assigned to the format (reference TNA1555078202S60), and today send a request to IANA to register the "text/vnd.sosi" MIME type for this format (referanse IANA #1143144). If all goes well, in a few months, anyone implementing the Noark 5 Tjenestegrensesnitt API spesification should be able to use an official MIME type and PRONOM code for SOSI files. In addition, anyone using SOSI files on Linux should be able to automatically recognise the format and web sites handing out SOSI files can begin providing a more specific MIME type. So far, SOSI files has been handed out from web sites using the "application/octet-stream" MIME type, which is just a nice way of stating "I do not know". Soon, we will know. :)

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.