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July 2001
Update on ISO
TC184/SC4 - Industrial Data - is the ISO Committee responsible for the development of STEP and related standards for exchange, sharing and integration of engineering data across a number of industrial sectors. The committee meets three times a year in a member country, when over 200 experts take part in up to 20 parallel meetings. The latest meeting for 2001 was held in San Francisco, California, USA from 9-15 June This progress report comes to you courtesy of ISO sources and a personal report from UK delegate Julian Fowler.
Standards - In General
Overall, this was a successful and productive meeting. Over 160 delegates attended it from 18 countries; the UK delegation was the third largest, with 24 registered experts.
The main results were as follows:
- ISO 10303 - STEP (v2) - most of the Parts that make up the second release are now complete.
- STEP modularization and module harmonization - good progress is being made by WGs 10 and 12. Guideline documents on modularization are being balloted for publication, and a core suite of PDM modules has passed all quality reviews. There are also plans to "integrate" the work of SC4 and the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI). Initially, their Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) will be considered for publication as Publicly Available Specifications (PAS) under ISO's "harvesting" procedure.
- STEP and the Web - Part 28 "XML representation of EXPRESS schemas and data" has had outstanding issues resolved and should soon be published as a Technical Specification. A new ad hoc group has been created to recommend actions to SC4 in the field of "Industrial data on the Web".
- ISO 18876 - "Integration of industrial data for exchange, access and sharing" (IIDEAS) - Parts 1 and 2 are being finalised for CD/TS ballot
- The SC4 Framework is about to be published as a standing document
Following ISO's agreement to support the use of HTML for publication, SC4 is progressing this for its standards and the use of XML to support their development.
Standards - for Process
WG3 is responsible, through its Technical Committees for a wide range of application areas. Those of interest to the process industries include T08 (Product Life Cycle), T20 (Process Plant) and T21 (Oil & Gas). They met to discuss matters relating to the development, status and plans for:
- ISO 15926 - Parts 1 (Overview) and 2 (Data Model) are now ready for DIS ballot
- Reference data for ISO 10303-221 (AP221) and ISO 15926 - Parts 4 (Initial reference data) and 5 (Procedures for registration and maintenance of reference data) are ready for WD/CD ballots
- ISO 15926 and PLIB - a proposed NWI will address the use of ISO 15926 reference data in PLIB and use of PLIB supplier dictionary data in ISO 15926
- Product Life Cycle Support (PLCS) - work continued within T08 and T20/T21 on this project, which aims to accelerate the development of ISO standards for lifecycle support. Topics addressed included the co-ordination of work on reference data for operations and maintenance and the harmonisation of PLCS modules.
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