The UC Curation Center of the California Digital Library has released the Unified Digital Format Registry (UDFR) Final Report.
Here's an excerpt:
A deep understanding of digital formats is necessary to support the long-term preservation of digital assets, as it facilitates the preservation of the information content of those assets, rather than just their bit stream representations. A format is the set of syntactic and semantic rules that govern the mapping between information and the bits that represent that information. The Unified Digital Format Registry (UDFR), http://udfr.org/, is a new open source, semantically-enabled platform for the collection, long-term management, and dissemination of the significant properties of formats of interest to the preservation community[4]. The UDFR builds upon and "unifies" the function and holdings of two existing registry solutions: PRONOM, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM, from the UK National Archives since 2002; and GDFR (Global Digital Format Registry), http://gdfr.info/, from Harvard University since 2006. While these services rely on older relational and XML database technology, the UDFR uses a semantic database in which all information is represented in RDF form and exposed as Linked Data. Use of the UDFR is open to the public, although contribution or editing of information requires prior self-service account
| Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works | Digital Scholarship |