Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle Support (CALS) is a
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secu ...
initiative for electronically capturing military documentation and linking related information.
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
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 official title of IGES is ''Dig ...
and
STEP
Step(s) or STEP may refer to:
Common meanings
* Stairs#Step, Steps, making a staircase
* Walking
* Dance move
* Military step, or march
** Marching
Arts Films and television
* Steps (TV series), ''Steps'' (TV series), Hong Kong
* Step (film), ' ...
as formats for digital data.
CALS includes standards for
electronic data interchange, electronic technical documentation, and guidelines for process improvement.
* The
CALS Table Model is a DTD standard for representing tables in SGML/XML. (see also
DocBook)
* The
CALS Raster file format was developed in the mid-1980s to standardize on graphics data interchange for electronic publishing for the federal government.
CALS was known formerly as ''Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistic Support''.
References
Further reading
* CALS homepage: (deprecated url) https://web.archive.org/web/19990209043448/http://www.acq.osd.mil/cals/
* File format is defined by MIL-STD-1840 and MIL-R-28002A
* Dawson, F., and F. Nielsen, "ODA and Document Interchange," UNIX Review, vol. 8, no. 3, 1990, p. 50.
* Hobgood, A., "CALS Implementation--Still a Few Questions," Advanced Imaging, April 1990, pp. 24–25.
* Details of the file format is available at: https://www.fileformat.info/format/cals/egff.htm
{{Authority control
Markup languages
Technical communication
SGML