The SAIF Toolkit

Safe Software Inc has been contracted by SRMB to produce the SAIF Toolkit. This toolkit consists of several software components and Application Programmer's Interfaces (APIs) which will make SAIF easy to use for various applications, including the development of data interchange software. It is being written in C++ and will be useable by both C and C++ developers in both Unix and Microsoft Windows environments.

The Toolkit is designed to work with SAIF datasets. Four points are noteworthy:

• Each SAIF dataset may contain a mix of data in SAIF format and other formats. (This capability may be of interest for example in multimedia applications.)
• The Toolkit is being designed to accommodate datasets which may range in size from very large to very small.
• Objects in a SAIF dataset may reference other objects in the dataset through object identifiers; they may also reference objects outside the dataset.
• Geographic data in SAIF format, resident in a SAIF dataset, occupies significantly less space than typical proprietary formats associated with commercial GIS systems.

The toolkit will become available by the 4th quarter of 1994. Watch these pages for more information on the toolkit as it becomes available. We will be releasing preliminary designs and inviting feedback on them over the summer months.