The first Technical Note in this series [1] introduced the international standard ISO 10303, informally known as STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data). Subsequent Technical Notes discussed various issues faced by users of STEP and how the ISO TC184/SC4 committee is addressing these issues. This article discusses the representation of STEP data using the Extensible Markup Language (XML). We begin by presenting XML’s advantages as an exchange medium for STEP. We then discuss some of the issues involved in designing an XML exchange mechanism for STEP and conclude with an update of SC4’s STEP/XML activities.

Issue Section:
Technical Notes
Keywords:
information technology, Internet, database languages, computer software
Topics:
Computer software, Databases, Design, Engineering standards, Internet
1.
Pratt
,
M. J.
,
2001
, “
Introduction to ISO 10303—the STEP Standard for Product Data Exchange
,”
ASME J. Comput. Inf. Sci. Eng.
,
1
(
1
), pp.
102
–
103
.
2.
ISO 10303-11: 1994, Industrial Automation Systems and Integration—Product Data Representation and Exchange—Part 11: Description Methods: The EXPRESS language reference manual.
3.
Schenk, D. A., and Wilson, P. R., 1994, Information Modeling: The EXPRESS Way, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
4.
ISO/FDIS 10303-21:2001(E), Industrial Automation Systems and Integration—Product Data Representation and Exchange—Part 21: Implementation Methods: Clear Text Encoding of the Exchange Structure.
5.
World Wide Web Consortium. Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Second Edition). W3C Recommendation. 6 October 2000. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.
6.
World Wide Web Consortium. Namespaces in XML. W3C Recommendation. 14 January 1999. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names.
7.
World Wide Web Consortium. XML Schema: Part 1: Structures. W3C Recommendation. 2 May 2001. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1.
8.
World Wide Web Consortium. XML Schema: Part 2: Datatypes. W3C Recommendation. 2 May 2001. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2.
9.
World Wide Web Consortium. Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification Version 1.0. W3C Recommendation. 13 November 2000. Available on-line at http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/.
10.
ISO TC184/SC4/WG11. XML representation for data sharing (CEB Binding-Draft 3.0). Revision N1362000-09-29. Available on-line at http://www.nist.gov/sc4/wg_qc/wg11/n136/.
11.
Barkmeyer, E. A., and Lubell, J., 2000, “XML Representation of EXPRESS Models and Data,” Proceedings of XML Technologies and Software Engineering workshop, Toronto. Available on-line at http://www.mel.nist.gov/msidlibrary/doc/xse2001.pdf.
12.
ISO/TS 10303-28: 2002(E), Industrial Automation Systems and Integration—Product Data Representation and Exchange—Part 28: Implementation Methods: XML representation of EXPRESS schemas and data.
Copyright © 2002
 by ASME
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