The Object Interchange Format (OIF) is a specification language used to dump and load
the current state of an ODMS to and from one or more files. OIF can be used to exchange
persistent objects between ODMSs, seed data, provide documentation, and drive test suites
(Cattell, 2000). OIF was designed to support all possible ODMS states compliant with the
ODMG Object Model and ODL schema definitions. It was also designed according toNCITS (National Committee for Information Technology Standards) and PDES/STEP
(Product Data Exchange using STEP, the STandard for the Exchange of Product model
data) for mechanical CAD, wherever possible.
An OIF file is made up of one or more object definitions, where an object definition is
an object identifier (with optional physical clustering indicator) and a class name (with
optional initialization information). Some examples of object definitions are: