ISO/IEC 18023-2
Abstract transmittal format

Introduction

Purpose

This part of ISO/IEC 18023 defines the abstract semantics and abstract structure used to encode SEDRIS transmittals. It defines how concrete encodings are developed so that conversion can be performed between all concrete encodings with a minimum of effort. This also ensures that SEDRIS application program interface (API) implementations will behave consistently regardless of the encoding in which the SEDRIS transmittal is encoded.

Design goals

The following design goals for the Abstract transmittal format and all concrete encodings are defined:

  1. the design shall be platform independent;
  2. everything in the SEDRIS data representation model shall be able to be captured;
  3. compacting the data shall be allowed, as long as it is lossless;
  4. each encoding shall be as efficient as possible, both when reading and when writing;
  5. the encoding technique shall be transparent to the application user allowing the underlying format to be changed and modified without affecting the user; and
  6. existing standards shall be used for external resources.