WHITE PAPER

Interoperability between STEP and SGML

Provide product management capability on SGML documentation.
Provide improved product data representation.

NOTE: This paper is also available as a PostScript file: Uncompressed (2.256M) or compressed (165k)


Contents

  1. Background
  2. Vision
    1. Goal
    2. Strategy
  3. Mission
    1. The Role of STEP
    2. The Role of the SGML Family of Standards
  4. Results
    1. SGML_STRING
    2. Proposed Changes to STEP Resource Models
    3. SGML-Compliant STEP Implementation Form
  5. Activities
    1. SWEDCALS Project
    2. Standardisation Work


Background

The focus of information systems is moving away from the simple objectives of reducing costs and improving the control of operations. Instead, many companies are aiming at establishing information architectures that will give them maximal use of their accumulated information and knowledge.

The new architectures must be able to share, reuse and maintain information and be flexible enough to accommodate continuous business process improvements. They must also support the complexity needed for increasingly finer levels of granularity of information context, content, and structure. The problems that the new architectures must overcome to manage the vast quantities of information needed for a modern enterprise are compounded by the incompatibility of computer platforms, proprietary application packages and stored legacy information.

As the business sectors in enterprises have been developed, their information resources have evolved to support the local sector needs. Even within the same business sector, different proprietary systems increase the difficulty in sharing, reusing and maintaining information. And it is more the rule than the exception that information systems in different business sectors use totally independent and incompatible systems.

It is self-evident in today's complex business enterprises that the integration and interoperability of information between business sectors is necessary. Architectures must be found to solve the problems of incompatibility, and open for information interchange within and across the entire enterprise.

Many businesses see the use of international standards as the architectural building blocks for providing harmony within business sectors and helping to reduce incompatibility between systems. However, even international standards have often been developed to solve information problems within separate business sectors and therefore even though the use of standards can solve the information problems within the individual business sectors, the problems of enterprise-wide information compatibility remain. To achieve full open information interchange and interoperability across enterprises it is necessary to design an architecture that can integrate the standards supporting individual business sectors.

Two of the most prominent and important information sectors in which compatibility and interoperability are needed are in the areas of: product data and documentation. There is a growing awareness of the benefits of integrating product data with the documentation describing the product. Moving the standards closer together to support product documentation as part of the life-cycle of manufactured products is becoming an actual and urgent topic for standards bodies and industry alike.

The SWEDCALS Initiative

SWEDCALS[1] regards it as a matter of high priority that the CALS- community and ISO- organisations understands the need of co-operation between the standards for documentation and the standard for product data. SWEDCALS is therefore recommending that the CALS and ISO committees responsible for these activities to concentrate their work and focus on the integration of available and accepted standards in order to produce some useful results.

To assist in the standardisation process and to provide a productive environment for aligning these two areas, the Swedish FMV CALS office[2] initiated a workshop in November 1994 with experts from both the STEP and the SGML arenas. Another workshop was arranged by Astra AB in March 1995, where the results from the earlier workshop were refined and further developed. The results from both of these workshops are documented in this white paper.

The STEP Committees responsible for the integration activities have been strengthened by the SWEDCALS initiative and have responded by focusing their work on the specific task of integrating the SGML family of standards into the STEP architecture.


Vision

Goal

The goal is to create an open architectural framework in STEP[3] (the ISO standard for product data) to support the interoperability with the SGML family of standards[4] (the ISO standards for documentation), without compromising either standard.

This will allow the production of products and documentation to be combined into one, well-managed environment, completely defined by accepted and widely used ISO standards. It will allow the integration of the documentation of the total life cycle of a product to be an integral part of the actual product.

Strategy

The goal will be accomplished through contributions from the STEP and SGML arenas and from end users with clear and immediate requirements for a practical solution. This strategy has been successfully used in the initiatory work in the two workshops that have been held.

The objectives will be to model solutions and to recommend proposals for the standards committees. The validity of these recommendations will be demonstrated by creating a series of prototype systems.

The solution must be built on the following basic agreements:

The solutions has to support both various and different levels of granularity of information objects between the product model and the model for documentation.

Each standard shall maintain its integrity and be modularised the way it suits the user's needs.

The open architectural framework in STEP should be able to:


Mission

The Role of STEP

STEP is designed to represent product data and its internal relations or structure. This is done using an object oriented approach. One of the strength of STEP is its architectural framework

The role of STEP is identified as the following:

  1. To represent product definition information, including product identification, product structure, product versioning, product configuration, full life cycle support, etc.
  2. To provide access to its architectural framework for other product related standards outside of the scope of ISO TC184/SC4, such as SGML.
  3. To fully support the needs of product documentation and other information products.

The first item is what STEP is designed to do already. SGML do not attempt to do this, except possibly when the product is an information product, e.g. a document or a book.

Item two identifies the need to open up the STEP standard, so it can embrace information encoded according to other standards. As we understand, STEP cannot try to embrace the entire world and exclude the use of other standards. We cannot accept that all new standards should be re-invented or re-defined within STEP. On the other hand, there is no other standard that possess such a rigid and mature architectural framework as STEP. There is a clear requirement to open up the STEP architectural framework to allow for other standards to coexist with STEP.

The third item requires some changes to the STEP standard, in order to treat an information product (a document, a publication, an electronic book, etc.) as a product in its own right. When those changes have been implemented, information products may be stored in a STEP environment, and will automatically benefit from the STEP product definition facilities in item one above, such as full life cycle support, versioning, etc. And this is something that many SGML projects are struggling with today, using proprietary formats, databases or document management systems.

The Role of the SGML Family of Standards

SGML is designed to model textual information for publishing purposes. It has demonstrated its capabilities and usefulness, and is a stable standard. HyTime has superior capabilities to link practically anything with anything, and it is the only existing standard for hypermedia.

The role of the SGML family of standards is identified as the following:

  1. To represent the information structures involved in product documentation, including classification and identification of types of documents or information, and support for all types of character code sets, special glyphs, and different language constraints.
  2. To extend the definition of product data to include product documentation.
  3. To act as an implementation form (in STEP terminology), or an interchange form (in SGML terminology) for extended product data, thereby becoming an interface between product data and an electronic or traditional publishing environment.
  4. To provide arbitrary referencing capabilities.

The first item is what SGML is designed to do, and what STEP has not succeeded in doing as well.

The second item places product documentation in its full sense into the product data domain. This is a natural extension of what is already being modelled with STEP today, and it is likewise an extension to the integration efforts of documentation and logistics support data. In short, this would be a significant step towards real integration of all product related information.

Item three will make it possible to export product documentation from a STEP environment into an SGML environment, which is required if the documentation is going to be processed and printed, or displayed. To achieve this, an SGML compliant STEP implementation form, equivalent to the STEP part 21, has to be defined.

The fourth item is possible due to the capability of HyTime to link together two (or more) objects of any type, stored in any format. In the STEP environment today, relations must be defined in the data model. With HyTime it is possible to create links (and thereby relations) between arbitrary STEP data (or other type of data). This might be of interest for very rare relations in order to optimise the performance of the system.


Results

SGML_STRING

What is the "SGML_STRING"

The SGML_STRING is an information structure defined as an EXPRESS construct (see diagram).

This structure allows the storing of SGML text as well as providing references to the necessary SGML constructs.

The SGML_STRING Architecture

The architecture of the SGML_STRING includes:

The content of the SGML_STRING is a string (sequence) of character codes. These character codes may include the character codes that SGML recognises as defining mark-up (tags). Since SGML in itself may use any character code set (not limited to ISO 10646), the content is of type BINARY.

The SGML_STRING references a DTD fragment which defines any of the mark-up codes found in the SGML_STRING content. As well, it provides a reference to the SGML declaration, and to HyTime processing instructions in the case HyTime is being used.

Why do we Need this Construct?

The introduction of the SGML_STRING construct into the STEP resource models permits the definition and utilisation of SGML text strings as STEP objects. This allows the STEP compliant product models to contain text which can be used to (automatically) produce SGML documents, e.g., for publishing documents.

Advantages for the STEP World

The users of STEP applications will be able to combine SGML text along with the design / manufacturing / production data. For example, the design of a component, such as an airplane wing can be directly coupled to textual information describing any relevant aspects of the design. This information can be added to and modified throughout the component's life cycle. And, at any time in the life cycle, this information can be exported to an SGML environment for publication.

Advantages for the SGML World

The ability to define SGML "products" in the STEP environment opens up the possibilities of tapping in to the broad spectrum of STEP associated applications, such as advanced modelling, automatic database generation, workflow, versioning, etc.

Advantages to All Users

The ability to integrate SGML and STEP data will allow the production of products and documentation to be combined into one, well-managed environment, completely defined by accepted and widely used ISO standards. It will allow the integration of the documentation of the design, production, maintenance; the whole life cycle of a product to be an integral part of the actual product. Thus the production of documentation will not only be more closely tied with the actual product, but publications will be more timely and more accurate as they will incorporate actual product data. As well, the documentation will become a component of the product, accompanying its changes from version to version and being (semi-)automatically updated with every change. Input to the documentation will be more readily available and the data will be more relevant.

How does it Work?

The SGML_STRING will be used in the definition of standard STEP APs (application protocols) and will thus be automatically configured as part of the products defined by these standards.

During the design, production, etc. phases of the product life-cycle the designers, engineers, documentors, etc. will add documentation, in the form of SGML_STRINGS, to the appropriate components of the product.

During the phases of the life-cycle where documentation is produced, for example where the product is instanciated from the database, the documentation will also be instanciated together with the appropriate STEP data (transformed into character codes). The instanciated documentation file can be exported (via the new SGML-compliant Step implementation form) to an SGML environment where it can be published, parallel to the production of the actual product.

Conclusion

The addition of the SGML_STRING to the STEP environment will allow the integration of the STEP and SGML family of standards. The advantages of the integration will permit users to integrate the documentation of products into the life-cycle of the product itself and the documentation will become just another component of the product, following the life-cycle as any other component.

An example of how document modelling might be achieved in STEP is shown in the diagram below, using EXPRESS-G;

Proposed Changes to STEP Resource Models

There are two reasons to propose changes to the currently existing STEP resource models:

Enabling SGML_STRING

To make the functionality of the SGML_STRING construct available throughout STEP, it would be best to replace all references to the type STRING in attributes defining descriptive text (such as the attributes called "description" in all resource models) by references to a construct, which can be either an SGML_STRING or a simple STRING. Such a construct can be declared based on the SELECT construct in EXPRESS. It does not only introduce SGML capabilities into those models but provides a high level of upward compatibility between the old and the new version of the models in addition.

Generic Versioning

The current resource models do not support generic versioning, that means the generation of versions of versions down to an arbitrary level. This is on the other side a very common feature in publication environments, and also others. Therefore the next revision of ISO 10303-41, 43, and 44 should take this requirement into account and come up with a solution where a version_type is always a subtype of the type of its owner (see the example for PRODUCT and PRODUCT_VERSION below). Applied correctly, such a structure gives the user the total control over which version of an object (specific or current) he or she wants to use.
ENTITY product;
  ...
DERIVE
  current     : product := ...;
INVERSE
  versions    : SET [0 : ?] OF product_version FOR owner;
END_ENTITY;

ENTITY product_version
SUBTYPE OF (product);
  owner       : product;
  ...
END_ENTITY;

PRODUCT_DEFINITIONs and PRODUCT_REPRESENTATIONs

STEP is currently supporting multiple PRODUCT_DEFINITIONs per PRODUCT_VERSION and multiple PRODUCT_REPRESENTATIONs per PRODUCT_DEFINITION. As the introduction of SGML capabilities is into STEP is opening up the door for at least one more representation technology, it might be appropriate to do the following changes in ISO 10303-41:

SGML-Compliant STEP Implementation Form

Premise

Both, the SGML and the STEP world must accept, that the other standard family exists, is standardised internationally (by ISO), and has implementations and a user community on its own.

Why a New Implementation Form

It is under the circumstances above unreasonable to assume that one standard will eventually provide all of the other standard's functionality in addition. But there are on the other side requirements, which can only be fulfilled today, if the functionality of members of both families of standards can be used in a co-operative way, such as:

To achieve this, an information flow between STEP environments (dealing with product data) and SGML environments (dealing with publication data) must be established in both directions. This could be done based on the existing data exchange formats, which already exist, both formats function properly in the cases of STEP to STEP and SGML to SGML communication respectively. But it would be an unnecessary burden for an SGML environment to be forced to extract the data relevant for it from a STEP exchange file. Using the SGML exchange file structure on the other side provides the additional capability to use e.g. the DSSSL mapping language to describe the necessary mapping from such an exchange file into the structures supported natively within the target SGML environment.

What is the New Implementation Form

The new implementation form is an SGML-conformant encoding of data in a STEP-compliant structure. It is therefore an SGML-compliant interchange format, the structure of which is derived from two sources:

As such, it enables the import of STEP data into an SGML environment and to process them there using SGML tools, as well as to prepare information products based on SGML and to store and archive them in association with the pertinent product information.

How will the New Implementation Form Work?

The new implementation form will work between STEP and SGML environments in exactly the same way as STEP exchange structures (according to ISO 10303-21) work between STEP environments, and SGML marked-up files between SGML environments. This means, that a STEP environment will generate an exchange structure according to the new working form in order to make STEP data available to a publication environment based on SGML. This exchange structure will then be mapped into the structures supported by the receiving system using SGML tools, such as a mapping processor based on the SGML mapping language DSSSL. After that it can be processed in the SGML environment without restrictions.

In the opposite direction, a DSSSL based mapping processor can generate an instance of this new implementation form restructuring SGML data to become structurally compliant with the an EXPRESS schema, such as a STEP AP. This will then be loaded into the STEP environment for on-line storage, further processing, or archival.


Activities

SWEDCALS Project

A number of activities have been defined in order to accomplish the goal. The immediate steps are to introduce the concept to ISO and the STEP, SGML, and CALS communities, and to demonstrate the functionalities in a series of prototypes. The activities will be kept together as an open SWEDCALS project.

The purpose of this SWEDCALS project is to establish the interoperability between the standards as outlined in this white paper, with a high degree of user participation, in order to ensure that the real business needs of the industry today are incorporated into the solution. The industry will start using these solutions today, due to the urgent needs, but requires that the standardisation work is being driven in the same direction.

Prototyping

The first prototype project should demonstrate the basic concepts of the SGML_STRING.

SGML data will be stored in an existing STEP environment with STEP data, as a series of SGML_STRINGS. These will be modelled in the STEP environment to form an information product, e.g. a book. The information product will be managed as any other product in the STEP environment. Finally, the information product will be exported from the STEP environment as an SGML file, and produced using an SGML system.

Other prototypes will follow this first one, each exploring further into the solution and becoming more practical in the sense that they will address real, existing user requirements, and possibly the will be built on real user data.

Information

Due to the need of changes in the STEP standard, the SWEDCALS project will also work to convince others of the benefits. Presentations will be held at major CALS, SGML and STEP events, results will be published, and prototypes will be demonstrated.

Preliminary Plan

A preliminary plan for the SWEDCALS project is shown below.

Standardisation Work

In parallel to the SWEDCALS project, the work of STEP committees and working groups will continue. We hope to have a close co-operation, and some persons will take part both in the committee work and in the SWEDCALS project.

In order to make the solution accepted as a part of the STEP standard, a lot of hard work remains, and we have identified the following standardisation activities.

Persistent Object Identification

It is essential that the SDAI always use persistent object identification. Without it, it will not be possible to link between SGML and STEP in an interactive environment.

The existing SDAI is being commented upon now, and the issue has already been pointed out by Germany, Sweden and the United States.

Proposed Changes to STEP Resource Models

The proposed changes to the STEP resource models have been discussed in this white paper.

It is essential that those changes are incorporated in the STEP standard, and that STEP is opened up as a architectural framework standard for other standards too.

Proposal for SGML_STRING

The SGML_STRING construct presented in this white paper needs to be fully documented, and ought to be discussed in WG3/T18, as a start.

The SGML_STRING is the central point of this solution to make STEP and SGML interoperable, and it is therefore of imperative significance that it becomes part of the STEP standard.

Proposal for a SGML-compliant STEP Implementation Form

In order to export STEP and SGML data from a STEP environment into a SGML environment, a new implementation form is most probably required, as discussed above. The current work have however not explored the details of this new implementation form, and a lot of work remains here. It is however totally dependent on the implementation of the SGML_STRING in the STEP standard.

Information Product AP

If STEP Application Protocols become combinable (they are not today), it is possibly interesting to develop an AP for information products. It depends however on the standardisation items above.