STEP Tools Weekly Newsletter for Monday December 14 (day late)

[Martin Hardwick]

This weekly newsletter is a brief update of what is going on in STEP
and at STEP Tools, Inc.  If you want to know more, try the STEP Tools
web site (http://www.steptools.com) or the contact for each article.

--------------------
STEP-NC Application Interpreted Model (ISO 14649-21)

The STEP-NC meeting last week in Erlangen was very successful.  The
team agreed that a new part should be added to ISO 14649 to be called
Part 21. This part will describe an Application Interpreted Model for
STEP-NC so that the data needed to make a part on an NC controller can
be mixed within all the other information in a product database.

STEP Tools, Inc. is going to be responsible for writing the new
part. A draft will be ready for the next meeting in Zurich in March. A
first draft of the mapping table that will be used in the new model
can be found on the STEP Tools, Inc. World Wide Web page at:

    http://www.steptools.com/library/stepnc/

In the next few months we will complete this mapping table and
document the Application Interpreted Model created by the mapping
table.


--------------------
Home Page for SESAME Project

SESAME is STEP Entry for Small And Medium Enterprises. STEP Tools,
Inc. has been working on a design for SESAME since May as part of a
Phase 1 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) project. An
architecture for SESAME has been written and can be found on the
SESAME home page at:

    http://www.steptools.com/demos/sesame/

The architecture shows how access to product data can be made easy for
a supply chain using Enterprise JavaBeans.


--------------------
Multi-File Translation Service

Our Translation Service now has a new user interface! The new interface
allows multiple files to be loaded into a translator.  Depending on the
translator this can allow multiple files to be translated in a single
transaction, or it can make the translator more flexible by allowing
control files to be loaded with the file to be translated.

The first translator to use the new interface is the 

    EXPRESS/EXPRESS-X Syntax Checker

The interface allows the Syntax Checker to compile several files at
the same time adding significant flexibility for EXPRESS files that
reference each other.


--------------------
How could STEP to XML Fail 6 times?

If you look at the translation statistics shown below you will see that
STEP to XML failed 6 times out of 8 tries. The failures occurred because
someone got confused about the purpose of the tool and tried to submit
an EXPRESS file to a tool that expected an AP-203 Part 21 file.

This failure has triggered us to examine these statistics again.  In the
next few months we will update our reporting to distinguish between tool
failures and user input failures. The tricky issue is to decide when a
failure is the users faults because if we get too aggressive the tool
statistics will become a 100% success.


--------------------
Translation Service Statistics

Summary:
Period Covered: Sun Dec  6 03:25:03 1998 -- Sun Dec 13 03:25:03 1998
Total usage: 63
Successful usage: 48 (76%)
Errors: 15 (23%)

Translator	total	errors	success rate

acis-ap203	8	0	100%
ap203-acis	35	7	80%
ap203-xml	8	6	25%
ap203check	3	0	100%
express2html	4	0	100%
steptoimage	5	2	60%

=======================================
All-Time stats

------------------------------------
Summary:
Period Covered: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 -- Sun Dec 13 03:25:11 1998
Total usage: 2286
Successful usage: 1978 (86%)
Errors: 308 (13%)

Translator	total	errors	success rate

acis-ap203	483	15	96%
ap203-acis	848	102	87%
ap203-stl	51	17	66%
ap203-vrml	274	78	71%
ap203-xml	51	12	76%
ap203check	42	7	83%
expfront	124	17	86%
expfront2	6	0	100%
express2html	200	0	100%
expxfront	11	1	90%
gifviz		30	17	43%
iges-ap202	10	0	100%
sp203-xml	13	2	84%
steptoimage	143	40	72%


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