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 United States federal executive departments, executive department of the federal government of the United States, U.S. federal government charged with coordinating and superv ...

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 List of file formats, file format that allows the CAD data exchange, digital exchange of information among computer-aided design (CAD) systems. It is an ASCII-based textual for ...

and STEP as formats for digital data. CALS includes standards for

electronic data interchange Electronic data interchange (EDI) is the concept of businesses electronically communicating information that was traditionally communicated on paper, such as purchase orders, advance ship notices, and invoices. Technical standards for EDI exist to ...

, electronic technical documentation, and guidelines for process improvement. * The CALS Table Model is a DTD standard for representing tables in

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on t ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

. (see also

DocBook DocBook is a Semantics (computer science), semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of docume ...

) * The

CALS Raster file format Cals or CALS may refer to: People with the surname * Isabelle Cals, French opera singer * Jo Cals (1914–1971), Dutch politician, Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1965 to 1966 * Adolphe-Félix Cals (1810–1880), French portrait and landsca ...

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