Database

Triggers when users need help with civil engineering, including structural analysis, reinforced concrete design, steel design, and geotechnical engineering. Activate for questions about beams, trusses, frames, soil mechanics, foundations, transportation engineering, hydraulics, hydrology, construction management, and building codes.

Triggers when users need help with control systems engineering, including transfer functions, block diagrams, and stability analysis. Activate for questions about Routh-Hurwitz criterion, Nyquist plots, Bode plots, PID controllers, tuning methods, root locus, state-space representation, digital control, LQR, Kalman filter, and process control applications.

Triggers when users need help with electrical engineering concepts, including circuit analysis, semiconductor devices, signal processing, and power systems. Activate for questions about Kirchhoff's laws, Thevenin/Norton equivalents, transistors, MOSFETs, Fourier transforms, filtering, ADC/DAC conversion, AC/DC circuits, analog and digital electronics, control systems, and PCB design.

Triggers when users need help with energy engineering, including solar energy, wind energy, and energy storage. Activate for questions about photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, solar cell technologies, wind turbine design, wind farm layout, batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen storage, nuclear energy, reactor types, fuel cycles, grid integration, smart grid, energy efficiency, and techno-economic analysis.

Triggers when users need help with environmental engineering, including water treatment, wastewater treatment, and air quality management. Activate for questions about coagulation, filtration, disinfection, activated sludge, MBR, solid waste management, site remediation, environmental impact assessment, sustainability metrics, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act.

Triggers when users need help with materials science and engineering, including crystal structures, phase diagrams, and mechanical properties. Activate for questions about tensile testing, hardness, fatigue, creep, metals and alloys, ceramics, polymers, composites, thin films, corrosion, and materials selection using Ashby charts.

Triggers when users need help with mechanical engineering, including statics, dynamics, strength of materials, machine design, and heat transfer. Activate for questions about stress and strain analysis, Mohr's circle, bearings, gears, shafts, conduction, convection, radiation, HVAC, manufacturing processes, CAD/CAM, and finite element analysis.

Triggers when users need help with robotics engineering, including robot kinematics, dynamics, actuators, and sensors. Activate for questions about forward and inverse kinematics, servo and stepper motors, encoders, IMU, lidar, cameras, path planning (RRT, A*), SLAM, ROS framework, industrial robotics, mobile robots, and human-robot interaction.

Triggers when users need help with systems engineering, including requirements engineering, system architecture, and V-model development. Activate for questions about model-based systems engineering (MBSE), SysML, trade studies, verification and validation, configuration management, reliability engineering, FMEA, fault trees, and lifecycle management.

The 3MF file format — the modern replacement for STL in 3D printing, supporting colors, materials, multi-object assemblies, and precise manufacturing data in a single package.

The 7z archive format — open-source high-ratio compression using LZMA2, with strong AES-256 encryption, solid archives, and multi-threading support.

A lossy audio codec standardized as part of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, designed to supersede MP3 with better quality at equivalent or lower bitrates.

Dolby

AI is Adobe Illustrator's native vector graphics file format, used for creating logos, illustrations, typography, and print-ready vector artwork in professional design workflows.

Apple

Apple

A speech-optimized audio codec designed for mobile telephony, encoding voice efficiently at very low bitrates for GSM and 3G cellular networks.

A lossless audio compression format achieving among the highest compression ratios of any lossless codec, at the cost of CPU intensity and limited compatibility.

The APK file format — Android

APNG is an extension of the PNG format that supports frame-based animation with full 24-bit color and alpha transparency, offering a higher-quality alternative to animated GIF.

The AppImage format — self-contained, distribution-agnostic Linux applications that run without installation, packaging all dependencies in a single executable file.

AVI is Microsoft

AVIF is a next-generation image format based on the AV1 video codec, offering superior compression efficiency with royalty-free licensing, HDR support, and wide color gamut capabilities.

Apache Avro data serialization system — a compact binary format with embedded schema, designed for data exchange, messaging, and long-term storage with schema evolution.

The BLEND file format — Blender

BMP is a simple raster image format that stores pixel data with minimal or no compression, primarily associated with Microsoft Windows and used where uncompressed image data is required.

The Bzip2 compression format — block-sorting compressor using the Burrows-Wheeler transform for higher compression ratios than gzip at the cost of speed.

A plain-text tabular data format where each line represents a row and fields are separated by commas, serving as the universal interchange format for structured data.

DDS (DirectDraw Surface) is a texture container format designed for GPU-ready compressed textures, supporting block compression, mipmaps, cube maps, and texture arrays for real-time 3D graphics.

The DEB package format — Debian and Ubuntu

The DMG disk image format — Apple

DNxHR is Avid

The legacy binary file format used by Microsoft Word from 1997 through 2003, storing rich text documents in OLE2 compound file containers.

The modern Microsoft Word document format based on Open XML, storing text, formatting, images, and other content in a ZIP-compressed package of XML files.

A high-resolution audio encoding using 1-bit sigma-delta modulation at very high sample rates, originally developed for Super Audio CD (SACD) and favored by audiophiles.

The DWG file format — AutoCAD

The DXF file format — AutoCAD

Environment variable configuration files — simple key-value files for storing application secrets and environment-specific settings, loaded at runtime.

EPS is a PostScript-based vector/raster file format historically used for print production and graphic interchange, now largely superseded by PDF and SVG but still encountered in legacy workflows.

The open standard ebook format maintained by the W3C, packaging XHTML content, CSS styling, images, and metadata into a single ZIP archive for reflowable digital reading.

The EXE file format — Windows Portable Executable (PE) format for applications, DLLs, drivers, and services, covering structure, signing, security, and analysis.

OpenEXR is a high dynamic range image format developed by Industrial Light & Magic for visual effects and CGI, supporting 16-bit and 32-bit floating-point pixels, multiple channels, and deep compositing.

The FBX 3D interchange format — Autodesk

An open-source lossless audio compression format that reduces file size by 50-70% while preserving bit-perfect audio fidelity.

FLV is the legacy Flash Video container format that once dominated web video delivery through Adobe Flash Player, now obsolete but still encountered in archives.

GeoJSON geographic data format — a JSON-based format for encoding geographic features with geometry and properties, standardized as RFC 7946.

Animated GIF is the classic bitmap animation format using the GIF89a specification, supporting frame-based animation with palette-limited color and transparency.

GIF is a bitmap image format supporting up to 256 colors per frame, widely known for its animation capabilities and used extensively for short loops, reactions, and simple web graphics.

The glTF and GLB 3D formats — Khronos Group

GraphQL schema definition language and query files — a typed API query language and schema system for defining data graphs and client-driven data fetching.

The GZIP compression format — the ubiquitous single-file compressor built on DEFLATE, essential for tar.gz archives, HTTP content encoding, and Unix/Linux workflows.

Hierarchical Data Format version 5 — a binary file format for storing large-scale numerical data, widely used in scientific computing, machine learning, and simulation.

HEIC/HEIF is a modern image container format using HEVC compression, adopted by Apple as the default photo format on iOS and macOS, offering roughly 50% smaller files than JPEG at equivalent quality.

The foundational markup language of the World Wide Web, defining the structure and content of web pages through elements, attributes, and a document object model.

iCalendar (.ics) event format — the universal standard (RFC 5545) for exchanging calendar events, scheduling, and time-based data between applications.

ICO is the image file format used for icons in Microsoft Windows, containing multiple image sizes and color depths in a single file for display at various resolutions.

INI configuration file format — a simple, flat key-value format organized by sections, used in legacy Windows applications and many Unix-style config files.

The IPA file format — Apple

Jupyter Notebook format (.ipynb) — a JSON-based document format combining live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text in computational notebooks.

The ISO 9660 disk image format — the standard for optical disc images, OS installation media, and software distribution as mountable virtual discs.