Spatial Archive and Interchange Format: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 13:51, 27 January 2017

Revision as of 02:56, 13 May 2017

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The primary advantage of SAIF was that it was inherently extensible following object oriented principles. This meant that data transfers from one GIS environment to another did not need to follow the lowest common denominator between the two systems. Instead, data could be extracted from a dataset defined by the first GIS, transformed into an intermediary, i.e., the semantically rich SAIF model, and from there transformed into a model and format applicable to the second GIS.

This notion of model to model transformation was deemed to be realistic only with an object oriented approach. It was recognized that scripts to carry out such transformations could in fact add information content. When Safe Software developed the [[Feature Manipulation Engine]] (FME), it was in large measure with the express purpose of supporting such transformations. The [http://archive.ilmb.gov.bc.ca/crgb/pba/saif/ FMEBC] was a freely available software application that supported a wide range of transformations using SAIF as the hub. The FME was developed as a commercial offering in which the intermediary could be held in memory instead of as a SAIF dataset.

== History ==

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SAIF became a Canadian national standard in 1993 with the approval of the Canadian General Standards Board. The last version of SAIF, published in January 1995, is designated as [http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/64080/publication.html CGIS-SAIF Canadian Geomatics Interchange Standard: Spatial Archive and Interchange Format: Formal Definition (Release 3.2)], issue CAN/CGSB-171.1-95, catalogue number P29-171-001-1995E.

The work on the SAIF modeling paradigm and the CSN classes was carried out principally by Mark Sondheim, Henry Kucera and Peter Friesen, all with the British Columbia government at the time. Dale Lutz and Don Murray of Safe Software developed the Object Syntax Notation and the [http://www.safe.com/reader_writerPDF/saif.pdf Reader and Writer] software that became part of the [[Feature Manipulation Engine]].

SAIF was brought to the attention of Michael Stonebraker and Kenn Gardels of the University of California at Berkeley, and then to those working on the initial version of the Open Geospatial Interoperability Specification (OGIS), the first efforts of what became the [[Open Geospatial Consortium]] (OGC). A series of 18 submissions to the ISO SQL Multimedia working group also helped tie SAIF to the original ISO work on geospatial features.

Today SAIF is of historical interest only. It is significant as a precursor to the [[Geography Markup Language]] and as the formative element in the development of the widely used [[Feature Manipulation Engine]].

== References ==