This is the home page for the Spatial Archive and Interchange Format (SAIF). The high level objectives of SAIF are part of the SAIF guided tour which will get you acquainted with SAIF, but in summary SAIF employs an object oriented data model and language for data specification and exchange. It was developed by the Surveys and Resource Mapping Branch (SRMB) of BC Environment, Lands, and Parks, and has been accepted as a provincial and federal standard for data exchange. SAIF is also the underlying data model for Open-GIS and the spatial portion of SQL/MultiMedia, which is part of the proposed SQL/3 ISO standard.
This home page is maintained by Safe Software Inc, a company dedicated to the promotion of SAIF. Safe Software develops and markets libraries, translators and support tools for SAIF. Safe Software has been contracted by SRMB to produce the SAIF Toolkit, which will make it easy to develop SAIF translators.
A frequently-asked-questions list has been created for SAIF.
Safe Software has converted the SAIF 3.1 Specification document to HTML. A brief introduction and a technical overview of SAIF can be found in the first two sections of the document. Section 3 contains the hyperlinked class definitions of all the SAIF classes. Browsing the classes with a WWW browser is much more fun and productive than reading them in a book.
The postscript version of this document is available via anonymous FTP. The bottom of this document lists ftp sites which carry SAIF or SAIF related information.
We are considering producing a stand-alone HMTL version of the SAIF 3.1 document for MS-DOS which would be browsed with the Windows Mosaic program, and distributing the complete package for a small handling charge. If you would be interested, send us some email.
Safe Software maintains a mailing list for people interested in developments pertaining to SAIF.
Information pertaining to SAIF, Open-GIS, and SQL/3 is being made available via anonymous FTP. We will put more site names here as we find out about them.
Right now, you can get the documents pertaining to the SQL/3 MultiMedia extensions from speckle.ncsl.nist.gov ftp site in the isowg3/sqlmm directory.
The SAIF 3.1 Specification is available in postscript format from s2k-ftp.cs.Berkeley.edu, in the /pub/sequoia/schema/STANDARDS/SAIF directory. It is also available at moon.cecer.army.mil in the /ogis/related/SAIF3.1 directory.
Though not directly SAIF-related, information on the SDTS standard can be obtained from sdts.er.usgs.gov
We welcome your feedback, either positive or negative, on SAIF and this web material. In particular, if you find any of these links don't work, please let us know. You can direct any email to dal@safe.com.