The aim of ReDIF is to describe the output aspects of an academic discipline. These include the resources that it creates, the creators of these resources as well as the institutions that support the creation process. Therefore disciplines can be viewed as naming authorities who ensure that the elements in the dataset that have a different identifier really are different. The version 1 of ReDIF is a relational metadata format. Each record has an identifier.
Records can use the identifiers of other records.
Basically, for each record type, the set of fields is defined, as well as their optionality, repeatability, and value syntax. The ReDIF specification format and the rr.pm software are the work of Ivan Y. Kurmanov. The main limitation of ReDIF version 1 is the flat structure of record types. The second version of ReDIF will object oriented. Record types will be classes.