Development of a long term viable dynamic data archive format

Abstract

For nearly forty years, the Universal File Format has served as a de facto standard for cross platform data interchange and archiving. However, as technology has progressed, the aging nature of this eighty character ASCII FORTRAN card image based format has become problematic. As a result, with the ever increasing legal requirements of long term record keeping, a flexible, open definition file format suitable for viable long term archiving of data and results, which is not dependent upon any particular hardware or operating system environment has become necessary. This paper focuses upon the various (sometimes conflicting) issues involved in the decision process and the resulting principal identified features necessary for realistic, long term reliable recovery of information and successful community adoption.