What it does: Read and writes the Java Serial File format. This is a binary file format for writing Java objects to disk. This adapter basically flushes the OBO-Edit datamodels directly to disk. The compact binary data is further compressed before it is written to disk, so these files are much smaller than the text files written by other adapters.
Supported features:Because this adapter does a raw save of the datamodels to disk, every feature of the ontology is preserved. However, these files have a major limitation: serial files created by one version of OBO-Edit cannot be read by another version of OBO-Edit. Even a very minor change to the OBO-Edit datamodels can make a serial file obsolete and unreadable. Therefore, serial files are appropriate as small backup files, but should never be used as primary data storage.
The Serial Adapter's basic mode conforms to the interface described in The Basic Flat File Interface.
The Serial Adapter has no Advanced mode. It reads in a single file and writes a single file. That's it.