Figure 1. Today the areas of design and manufacture are quite distinct from the domain of documentation.
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Product data carries essential information about the design, manufacture, operations, etc. of the actual production of an enterprise. Most product data is created and used early in the life-cycle of a product such as the phases of design, analysis, and manufacturing.
Product documentation describes many aspects of a product; its design, use, maintenance, disposal, etc. Most product documentation, for example training, maintenance, and operation manuals are created in the later phases of a product's life cycle. Product documentation uses product data as the primary source of information.
The integration of the data associated with a product and its documentation is a primary step toward the enterprise-wide information systems that are needed by industry today. The combining of product documentation into the total life-cycle of manufactured products allows more effective, timely, and accurate descriptions of the product and is profitably reflected in many parts of a product's life-cycle.
Figure 1.
Today the areas of design and manufacture are quite distinct from the domain of
documentation.
Today, product design and product documentation are totally separated processes and there is practically no automated information flow between these two domains. Design and manufacturing changes made to a product, i.e., product data changes, are difficult to integrate into the product documentation and tend often to delay product deliveries as there are no integrated mechanisms for transparently conveying changes between the two environments.
The domain of product data management is well developed in functionality, however, it is still very vendor oriented. There have been many software management tools and products developed for product data, e.g., product data management (PDM), version control, configuration management. These tools are readily available but are not as yet integrated into other domains.
The STEP standards are designed to create interchange formats and standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow the flow of product data between different vendors' products and applications. Implementations of STEP interchange are spreading but there is still a lack of wide spread applicable software.
The domain of product documentation management is less developed than the software for managing product data. Similar to product data, the structures, sizes, and complexities of product documentation restrict the free use of developed business management and database technologies. Thus, document systems today are not only vendor oriented, but mainly only provide software for creating and publishing. Software solutions specific to the management of complex, structured documents are still in their infancy.
The SGML standard provides a focus point for the management of documents and particularly for documentation which is complex and structured. SGML is designed for the interchange of complex, structured information and provides a neutral, platform independent way of addressing and managing product documentation.
In order to address the above problems, the following requirements need to be met:
In order to protect the end user from managing data in proprietary formats, the proposed technical solutions and related specifications are based on the STEP and SGML family of standards. As well, the required information models and document type definitions recommended by T14 will be incorporated as part of the developing STEP standards.