Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support

Last updated

Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support (CALS) is a United States Department of Defense initiative for electronically capturing military documentation and linking related information. [1]

The initiative has developed a number of standard specifications (protocols) for the exchange of electronic data with commercial suppliers. These standards are often referred to as simply "CALS". CALS standards have been adopted by several other allied nations.

The CALS initiative has endorsed IGES and STEP as formats for digital data.

CALS includes standards for electronic data interchange, electronic technical documentation, and guidelines for process improvement.

CALS was known formerly as Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistic Support.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PDF</span> Portable Document Format, a digital file format

Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Based on the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to display it. PDF has its roots in "The Camelot Project" initiated by Adobe co-founder John Warnock in 1991. PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008. The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vector graphics</span> Computer graphics images defined by points, lines and curves

Vector graphics are a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display and printing hardware, vector data models and file formats, as well as the software based on these data models. Vector graphics is an alternative to raster or bitmap graphics, with each having advantages and disadvantages in specific situations.

Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processing, optical character recognition, image manipulation, desktop publishing, and page-layout applications. The format was created by the Aldus Corporation for use in desktop publishing. It published the latest version 6.0 in 1992, subsequently updated with an Adobe Systems copyright after the latter acquired Aldus in 1994. Several Aldus or Adobe technical notes have been published with minor extensions to the format, and several specifications have been based on TIFF 6.0, including TIFF/EP, TIFF/IT, TIFF-F and TIFF-FX.

PICT is a graphics file format introduced on the original Apple Macintosh computer as its standard metafile format. It allows the interchange of graphics, and some limited text support, between Mac applications, and was the native graphics format of QuickDraw.

A GIS file format is a standard for encoding geographical information into a computer file, as a specialized type of file format for use in geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial applications. Since the 1970s, dozens of formats have been created based on various data models for various purposes. They have been created by government mapping agencies, GIS software vendors, standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, informal user communities, and even individual developers.

A document file format is a text or binary file format for storing documents on a storage media, especially for use by computers. There currently exist a multitude of incompatible document file formats.

A digital image is an image composed of picture elements, also known as pixels, each with finite, discrete quantities of numeric representation for its intensity or gray level that is an output from its two-dimensional functions fed as input by its spatial coordinates denoted with x, y on the x-axis and y-axis, respectively. Depending on whether the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type. By itself, the term "digital image" usually refers to raster images or bitmapped images.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hierarchical Data Format</span> Set of file formats

Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is a set of file formats designed to store and organize large amounts of data. Originally developed at the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications, it is supported by The HDF Group, a non-profit corporation whose mission is to ensure continued development of HDF5 technologies and the continued accessibility of data stored in HDF.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerber format</span> Standard file format used for designing printed circuit boards

The Gerber format is an open, ASCII, vector format for printed circuit board (PCB) designs. It is the de facto standard used by PCB industry software to describe the printed circuit board images: copper layers, solder mask, legend, drill data, etc. The standard file extension is .GBR or .gbr though other extensions like .GB, .geb or .gerber are also used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IGES</span> Initial Graphics Exchange Specification

The Initial Graphics Exchange Specification (IGES) is a vendor-neutral file format that allows the digital exchange of information among computer-aided design (CAD) systems. It's an ASCII-based textual format.

The National Imagery Transmission Format Standard (NITFS) is a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Federal Intelligence Community (IC) suite of standards for the exchange, storage, and transmission of digital-imagery products and image-related products.

Raster graphics editors can be compared by many variables, including availability.

An image file format is a file format for a digital image. There are many formats that can be used, such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Most formats up until 2022 were for storing 2D images, not 3D ones. The data stored in an image file format may be compressed or uncompressed. If the data is compressed, it may be done so using lossy compression or lossless compression. For graphic design applications, vector formats are often used. Some image file formats support transparency.

Cals or CALS may refer to:

An interactive electronic technical manual (IETM) is a portal to manage technical documentation. IETMs compress volumes of text into just CD-ROMs or online pages which may include sound and video, and allow readers to locate needed information far more rapidly than in paper manuals. IETMs came into widespread use in the 1990s as huge technical documentation projects for the aircraft and defense industries.

The CALS Table Model is a standard for representing tables in SGML/XML. It was developed as part of the CALS DOD initiative.

The CALS Raster file format is a standard for the interchange of graphics data. It was developed by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) as part of the Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support (CALS) initiative. It defines a standard storing raster (bit-mapped) image data, either uncompressed or compressed using CCITT Group 4 compression.

OpenRaster is a file format proposed for the common exchange of layered images between raster graphics editors. It is meant as a replacement for later versions of the Adobe PSD format. OpenRaster is still in development and so far is supported by a few programs. The default file extension for OpenRaster files is ".ora".

Sun Raster was a raster graphics file format used on SunOS by Sun Microsystems. The format has no MIME type, it is specified in @(#)rasterfile.h 1.11 89/08/21 SMI. The format was used for some research papers.

References

  1. "NATO CALS Handbook". CiteSeerX. March 1, 2000. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.194.9777 . Archived from the original on 2023-07-02. Retrieved 2023-07-02.

Further reading