Benefits include a single input file format for all downstream applications and a read lookup index enabling downstream formats to reference reads without duplication of all of the read specific information.
This format has been developed as an open collaborative effort between many groups and individuals.
The mailing list for the group is maintained here.
Version format a.b.c
Hence, the documents v1.3 and v1.3.1 both refer to the same format, v1.3.
The document describing v1.3 is available here as a single HTML file.
A draft revision of the v1.3 document (v1.3.1.) is available here as a single HTML file.
SRF has a dependancy on the ZTR package and the corresponding version of ZTR is 1.11.0. It is available here. ZTR provides an implementation of SRF in C.
A C++ implementation of SRF is available here.
The SRF project is accepting feature requests.