BIIF is a standard developed to provide a foundation for interoperability in the interchange of imagery and imagery-related data among applications.  This part of ISO/IEC 12087 provides a detailed description of the overall structure of the format, as well as specification of the valid data and format for all fields defined with BIIF.

• Provides a means whereby diverse applications can share imagery and associated information.
• Allows an application to exchange comprehensive information to users with diverse needs or capabilities, allowing each user to select only those data items that correspond to their needs and capabilities.
• Minimizes preprocessing and postprocessing of data.
• Minimizes formatting overhead, particularly for those applications exchanging only a small anount of data nad for bandwidth-limited systems.
• Provides a mechanism (Transportable File Structure, TFS) to interchange PIKS image and image-related objects.
• Provides extensibility to accommodate future data, including objects.

• BIIF Part 5, ISO/IEC 12087-5, 1 December 1998 (922Kb .pdf file)