SAIF's High Level Objectives

SAIF is a standard designed to support spatial and spatiotemporal data sharing. Three general areas of use are recognized:

• SAIF may be used to model geographic data. SAIF constructs and user extensions can be expressed in several data definition languages and programming languages, as well as a variety of object oriented CASE tools.
• SAIF also includes a neutral interchange format. A SAIF toolkit is being developed to support the development of translators, browsers, validators, and other associated software.
• Because the SAIF data format is self describing and highly efficient, it may also be used directly for archival purposes.

The SAIF 3.1 Formal Specification document deals principally with first point above. (However it does include a description of SAIFtalk , a language for encoding - in ASCII - both type definitions and object values.) Other SAIF documents address a compressed encoding, the SAIF toolkit , and profiles.