DIF Description: 

  Doctype Classes
        |
        |
     Doctype (Generic Document Type)
        |
        |
     COLONDOC
        |
        |
     COLONGRP
        ^
       DIF

The Directory Interchange Format (DIF) is a de-facto standard used to create directory entries which describe a group of data. Its use is wide spread among US government agencies. A DIF record consists of a collection of fields which detail specific information about the data.

From the point of view of syntactical structure it is a heirarchical colondoc-based document format. The DIF class has been implemented as a child of COLONGRP.

A DIF record starts with a Entry_ID: followed by a unique identification string for the record (Handle), eg:
Entry_ID: 1013DS-A.cdf
The Field Name Group is a reserved name. It supports some structure via Groupings. 

Group: GroupName
        Field:  Value
        Field:  Value
        Field:  Value
End_Group

Groups may contains groups. For each Group one must specify End_Group to inform the parser where the end of the group is.

Its probably best understood by looking at the example record below. 

Group:  Technical_Contact
        First_name:  Frances
        Middle_name:  S.
        Last_name:  Hotchkiss
        Phone:  508-457-2242
        Phone:  FAX 508-457-2310
        Group:  Address
                384 Woods Hole Road
                Quissett Campus
                Woods Hole, MA  02543-1598
                USA
        End_Group
End_Group

The fields

Technical_Contact
contains everything from First_name to the End_Group in Address.
First_name
contains Frances
Middle_name
contains S.
Last_name
contains Hotchkiss
Phone
contains 508-457-2242 and FAX 508-457-2310
Address
contains everything from 384 Woods Hole Road to USA

The Headline is the contents of the Entry_Title field.

Example DIF record:

The MIME type for Raw Records is Application/X-DIF.

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