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Can standards such as STEP help solve interoperability problems? Yes, but not in the way they are being used today. If we ask any vendor if they support open standards, they produce a whole list of standards that they claim they support. And here lies the problem - and related costs - that the user community have to put up with. Clearly, the proliferation of standards goes against the very principle of having them - which is to promote interoperability. So why are there so many standards? To answer this question we need to look at what the standards are meant for. PDF, JT and JPEG are virtually unrivalled for text, geometry and images respectively. All three cover generic application domains where what they describe is stable i.e. their scope is well defined. In contrast standards such as STEP (ISO 10303), ISO 15926, etc. are meant for general applications where the scope is not well defined. Even when attempting to define data models (e.g. STEP Application Protocols) that focus on specific application domains the scope is not well defined. Furthermore, in practice the application scope is dynamic and will change as business requirements and technology change over time. Therefore attempting to define monolithic standard data models whose approval process take five years or more will always present application developers insurmountable problems. It is not surprising therefore, that vendors continue to use proprietary data models in their products hence the scale of interoperability and data quality problems we see today. The question therefore, is how can the user community get best of class products that are interoperable? The answer, judging by the scale of interoperability and data quality problems that are prevalent in industry, is not through the way standards are being used today i.e. as intermediate data models in data exchange processes. Pre-defining what information can be exchanged between applications (the data model), implies that the type of information that need to be shared is fixed. This is never the case in a dynamic business environment. What is more important is defining how applications can interoperate. That is, it is more important to define the language rather than the sentences that can be used. This is why XML has been so successful and ubiquitous, while STEP and similar standards have been in limited use. Which leads us to the conclusion, that the most important part of STEP, is not the data models (Application Protocols), but the language (EXPRESS). Many solution providers have recognised this fact and have built XML based-interoperability solutions. However, by doing so, they are choosing XML for its popularity and not for its suitability for the task. XML was designed for, and works well, as a mark-up language. EXPRESS on the other has been designed as a data definition language, and therefore is more suited for building complex data models. What is more, because EXPRESS models map easily to relational models, it lends itself for use in applications where persistent storage is required. Which begs the question: Is there any reason why solution providers could not define their proprietary data models in EXPRESS? The answer is no. They can define their data model in anyway they wish to deliver the performance and features they want to deliver to their customers, while at the same time making their products and the data they generate interoperable with the outside world. Using EXPRESS in this way changes the interoperability debate from data exchange to persistent storage and data sharing. Adding persistent storage introduces a new dimension to interoperability solutions. It enables the business context to be captured, which is not possible today with the main focus being on moving data from A to B as bits and bytes. Furthermore, increasingly companies are looking to leverage knowledge gained from past products and programmes into current and future ones. This is what is referred to as the Business Information Assets in the Datamation PLM Model 2010. Business Information Assets consists of:
Defining the three components of the Business Information Assets in EXPRESS would make it more readily accessible and reusable throughout the company and by all stakeholders that have the need and authority to use them. Click here for further information.
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