0 Introduction

0.1 Purpose

This part of ISO/IEC 18023 specifies the semantics and abstract syntax of SEDRIS transmittals. Specifying a single abstract syntax for all encodings permits conversion between SEDRIS transmittals encoded in different formats with minimal effort. This also enables implementations of the SEDRIS application program interface (API) to consistently interpret SEDRIS transmittals regardless of their encoding.

0.2 Design goals

This International Standard was developed to fulfill the following requirements. The design shall:

1. be platform independent,
2. completely represent the SEDRIS data representation model,
3. support lossless compression,
4. allow the development of encodings that may be efficiently read and written,
5. isolate the SEDRIS API from the encoding format of SEDRIS transmittals, and
6. leverage existing standards.

http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ISO_IEC_18023-2_Ed1.html