Heratio Help Center article. Category: Digital Preservation.

Format identification (PRONOM)

Why identify formats?

You cannot protect against a format becoming unreadable if you do not know which formats you hold. Format identification tells you exactly what each file is - not by trusting its extension, which can be wrong or disguised, but by reading the file's internal byte signature.

PRONOM and PUIDs

Heratio identifies formats against PRONOM, the international technical format registry maintained by The National Archives (UK). Each format has a PUID (PRONOM Unique Identifier), for example:

fmt/353 - TIFF
fmt/276 - PDF 1.7
fmt/43 - JPEG

A PUID pins the exact format and version, which is what lets you judge obsolescence risk and plan migration.

How Heratio does it

Heratio uses Siegfried, a PRONOM signature tool (the same family as DROID), to identify files by their byte signatures and record the PUID, format name, and version. Identification can run:

at ingest, as a per-file step (enable "Format identification" in ingest settings), and
on demand or on a schedule, sweeping records that have not been identified.

Doing it in Heratio

View identification coverage and confidence at /admin/preservation/identification.
View the format registry - every format you hold with its preservation risk level - at /admin/preservation/formats. Low-risk formats (open, well supported) need no action; high or critical-risk formats are candidates for migration.

What identification feeds

Risk assessment and migration planning - at-risk formats are flagged so you can convert them to stable preservation formats (see the conversion view).
Your maturity score - PUID coverage and a monitored format registry raise your "Content / file formats" level in the preservation maturity assessment.

Note

Identification needs the Siegfried tool installed on your server. If it is not present, Heratio falls back to basic MIME-type information only, and your PUID coverage will be low until Siegfried is available.

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