AbstractThis paper points out the technical requirements needed for the co-existence of product documentation produced in SGML-compliant environments and product data produced in STEP-compliant environments. It must be noted that this white paper does not cover the complete scope of the T14 mandate and that there are many aspects of the T14 work on product documentation which are not reported here. |
Many enterprises are becoming aware of the benefits of having company-vital information available and useable to many different applications and users. However, designing and implementing a comprehensive information system which can provide the maximum use of enterprise-wide accumulated information and knowledge is a daunting task. Systems must be built about an architecture which can enable the sharing, re-use, and maintenance of new and legacy information that is certainly to be of differing data types and may as well be distributed over diverse platforms and many different geographic locations. As well, there is an increasing need to control and support the total life cycle of vital information as well as providing for the complexity of changing levels of the users needs.
These are daunting tasks facing information systems and it is obvious that some kind of stable and common foundation is needed before realistic planning and design can be effective. This stable and common base is being provided by a number of standards efforts which are standardizing data formats and, in some cases, also the strategies needed to access the information objects comprising the data.
Two of the most prominent and important information technologies encompassed by the standards efforts are the areas of product data and documentation. Product data, which is represented by the ISO 10303 standards (STEP) are being developed by a broad range of industry and provide extensive support for modeling, automated storage schema generation, life-cycle support, etc. Many of the same industries have adopted and extensively used the SGML family of standards ISO 8879, Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 10744 HyTime, and ISO 10179 Document Style Semantics and Specification Language, to represent the content that comprises their documentation.
Product data carries essential information about the design, manufacturing, etc. of the actual production of an enterprise. Product documentation is also a very conspicuous carrier of information and a particularly important one in that it describes many aspects of a product; its design, use, maintenance, disposal, etc.
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 would allow more effective, timely, and accurate descriptions of the product and would be profitably reflected in many parts of a product's life-cycle. It is a prime example of the benefits that are not being realized due to the lack of an integrated information system.
Product data is most often associated with the description of the processes of design and manufacture. The data it encompasses is most frequently associated with the physical aspects of products. The computing environments of product data are often related to the environments of Computer Aided Design/Manufacturing/... (CAD/CAM/CAE).
Product documentation, on the other hand, is more frequently associated with the description of the processes of operation, maintenance, and other user-oriented activities. Product documentation is often produced by persons not associated with either the design or the manufacturing and in computing environments supported by systems with totally different data formats.
However, product documentation needs to draw upon not only the physical shapes and technical details but also the design decisions, the manufacturing restrictions, etc. involved in the life-cycle of the product. Thus, access to the design and manufacturing data is essential for product documentation and the more direct the access, the more reliable and up-to-date the documentation can be.
Similar to any product, documentation undergoes the processes of design, manufacture, production, distribution, etc., only frequently under other names, to wit: authoring, editing, publishing, etc. And, similar to product data, the documentation must be managed, controlled, versioned, etc., in a life-cycle analogous to most product data.
As well, similar to any product data, there is a distinction between the documentation data associated with a product and the representation of this data as an instance of the product documentation. This representation of product documentation is composed of the document content, document structure semantics, presentation semantics and product data transformations.(1)
Product documentation can be considered as a representation of the product data that is assembled and transformed during the product life-cycle for delivery and communication. Product documentation is fundamental to the product life-cycle, both documenting its stages and also part and parcel of the product itself. In some cases product documentation is the entire product.
The representation of product documentation is a great explored territory. There are not a lot of surprises. Industry initiatives in aerospace, defense, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, telecommunications, and many others have chosen an ISO standard—SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879)—as the mode of representation of their product documentation. International CALS has done the same, and indicated to the STEP community that it is a requirement of CALS that future handling of STEP technical documentation data be compatible with SGML techniques and approaches.
Representation of product documentation in STEP form facilitates the derivation and maintenance of product documentation together with the related product data. Such representation allows for the use of applicable STEP facilities and features to control, manage, and exchange product documentation between STEP compliant systems.
As a consequence, we can safely assume that the obvious question is: How can STEP and SGML co-exist?
The vision is an information architecture based on the international standards of STEP and SGML integrating product documentation and product data throughout the total life-cycle of a product.
We begin to address this vision by recognizing that neither the environment supported by SGML nor the environment supported by the STEP standard can or will subsume the other. A form of co-existence must be reached allowing each individual environment to provide its maximum potential.
The co-existence of STEP and SGML must allow the integration of the documentation of the total life cycle of a product to be an integral part of the product itself. The production and management of products and documentation will be integrated while retaining the benefits of both individual environments.