Wikidata:Property proposal/Kaitai Struct format gallery ID
Kaitai Struct format gallery ID edit
Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Authority control
| Description | identifier in the global Kaitai Struct formats repository |
|---|---|
| Represents | file format (Q235557) |
| Data type | External identifier |
| Domain | file formats |
| Allowed values | ^[a-z][a-z0-9_]*$ |
| Example | Portable Network Graphics (Q178051) → png TrueType Font (Q751800) → ttf RAR (Q243303) → rar |
| Source | http://formats.kaitai.io/ https://github.com/kaitai-io/kaitai_struct_formats |
| Formatter URL | http://formats.kaitai.io/$1/ |
| See also | File Format Wiki page ID (P3381) PRONOM file format ID (P2748) Uniform Type Identifier (P3641) Library of Congress Format Description Document ID (P3266) |
- Motivation
Kaitai Struct format gallery is an effort to build a machine-readable repository of binary file format / network protocol specifications using .ksy specification files. Being fully machine-readable, these files can be used to:
- generate human-readable documentation
- visualize any given binary file in a certain format, showing which bytes store which values
- generate libraries in multitude of target languages
In this regard, this resource is both useful as a human-readable reference for those who want to learn about particular implementation details of a certain file formats, or as a source of parsing libraries (licensed under free / open source licenses), ready to be incorporated into software that requires such parsing. There are ~90 file formats available already and it's growing with people contributing more and more formal file format specs.
KS repository uses simple identifiers for all format names that are compatible with majority of programming languages as class names — first character is always a lowercase Latin letter, then a mixture of lowercase Latin letters, ASCII numbers and underscores are allowed.
(Disclosure: I'm one of Kaitai Struct developers). --GreyCat (talk) 18:32, 5 September 2017 (UTC)
- Discussion
Comment described at URL (P973) is already being used to link from instance of (P31) file format (Q235557) to Kaitai Struct YAML files in the Git master repository. The Formats Gallery also adds a block diagram of the structure of the file format, as well as parser source code in various languages. Instead of creating a new property just for the KS gallery, perhaps image (P18) could be used to link to the block diagram image directly? For the parser source code, the existing described at URL (P973) to the Kaitai Struct YAML files arguably describe the file format more succinctly than derived parser source code. Dhx1 (talk) 12:54, 7 September 2017 (UTC)
- Comment I won't actually recommend linking to raw GitHub exports URLs at all, there is no guarantee that GitHub would:
- continue to provide them with exactly the same functionality and URL scheme,
- still host Kaitai project in some time in future
- On the other hand, a distinct domain link (i.e. formats.kaitai.io) seems to be much more stable.
- However, what's even more important, is that this set of format specs is frequently supposed to be working together (i.e. one format could require other(s)); if you just link to that single format *and* it will require some other format to compile, then this whole linking is pointless — you can't compile it, you can't find relevant dependencies (you'll have to resort to Googling them manually), you basically can't use it. My main point of separate property proposal is that this is not just a way to link to some code, but it *is an identifier*. Besides that "one format uses other" scenario, this identifier might be useful per se — for example, this repository of FLOSS-licensed format specs is used (and distributed along) with several other projects, and all of them would accept "png" as an identifier of a PNG. It is not that much important to have a link to formats.kaitai.io (although, in my opinion, it would certainly help), than to just store the identifier. --GreyCat (talk) 14:39, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
WikiProject Informatics has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead. ChristianKl (talk) 08:47, 20 October 2017 (UTC)
Support. This looks like a useful property to me. YULdigitalpreservation (talk) 13:31, 20 October 2017 (UTC)- Support. It seems useful for me. Giovanni Alfredo Garciliano Díaz ★ diskutujo 03:09, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
- @Giovanni Alfredo Garciliano Diaz, YULdigitalpreservation, Dhx1, GreyCat:
Done Created as Kaitai Struct format gallery ID (P4460). ChristianKl (talk) 17:57, 31 October 2017 (UTC)
