| Courtesy Robin Drogemuller: In the various engineering disciplines, communication
between the members of the team is critical. For communication to occur we need :
- shared knowledge
- a context for the message
- a message itself
- a language in which to encode the message
- a medium for exchanging the body of the message.
The STEP standards (ISO 10303) specify a set of protocols to
exchange product model data for international trade and cooperation
in major industries including automotive, electronics, aerospace,
plant engineering and civil engineering.
The STEP standards are defined using a product modelling language
called EXPRESS (ISO10303:11). The major portion of the STEP standards
is made up of Application Protocols. These define the domain of
discourse (shared knowledge) in an exchange. The context of the
exchange is provided by the project.The message is exchanged using
file-based exchange based on IS010303:21. The language for exchange
of the schema is EXPRESS, the Part 21 exchange format is used to
encode the message. The medium is the exchange file.
In this example, MINERVA is used to process STEP/Express schema
files in a standard Internet Browser on the client machine for
efficient local processing. The necessary programs, schema, and
product data model are obtained from the server using the Internet.
The example is provided by
Robin Drogemuller of CSIRO
based on work done while he was with James Cook University.
The schema "schema.pro" is implemented in
ISO/IEC 13211-1 Prolog.
The product model "tetra.exg" is
given according to ISO-10303:21 STEP/"Clear text encoding of an
exchange file".
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