STEP Tools Newsletter for November 2003

[Martin Hardwick]

This 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 
at http://www.steptools.com


--------------------------------------- 
Opening of STEP-NC Manufacturing Center 

Our new STEP-NC Manufacturing Center in Watervliet Arsenal will
be officially opened on November 19th. If you would like to
join us please reply to this e-mail. We will demonstrate STEP-NC
on a Giddings & Lewis 450 4-axis HMC


--------------
DIS for AP-238

The Draft International Standard for AP-238 is getting near 
completion. The new version will included turning and milling
features, processes and tools, explicit and implicit tool 
paths, GD&T tolerances and PDM attributes.

There will be several STEP-NC implementation projects in progress
next year. These projects will determine the order of STEP-NC
implementation and decide which cases are implemented most efficiently
by the standard and the new STEP-NC translators.


------------
XML and STEP

The new part 28/XML standard will enable the definition of XML
Schema from the STEP Application Protocol mapping tables. This
will make the definition XML data for STEP much more straightforward
and easy to follow because these tables frequently restrict the
large range of cases allowed in an EXPRESS model to one or two
specific cases for a particular mapping.

A three level product model stack is emerging for representing
STEP data on the web with EXPRESS defining the lowest level,
XMLSchema the second level and RDF the top level. Soon this 
architecture will enable distributed STEP databases where 
engineers use search and integration engines to identify
compatibles products and processes on the World Wide Web.


------------------- 
Translation Service

Summary: 
Period Covered: Sun Nov 2 04:30:17 2003 -- Sun Nov 9 04:30:17 2003 
Total usage: 44 
Successful usage: 39 (88%) 
Errors: 5 (11%)

Translator total errors success rate
ACIS to STEP: 20 2 90% 
STEP to ACIS: 10 0 100% 
AP203 Checker: 3 0 100% 
Parasolid to STEP: 1 0 100% 
STEP to Parasolid: 3 0 100%
======================================= 
All-Time stats
------------------------------------ 
Summary: 
Period Covered: Wed Dec 31 19:00:00 1969 -- Sun Nov 9 04:31:31 2003 
Total usage: 20751 
Successful usage: 19204 (92%) 
Errors: 1547 (7%)

== ST-Announce Administrative Notes ==================================
To be removed from this mailing list, send mail to majordomo at steptools.com
with the line "unsubscribe st-announce" as the body of the message.  To be
added to this list, send mail with the body "subscribe st-announce"
-
Short news items can be submitted to st-announce-owner for inclusion in
the next STEP Tools newsletter.  Other questions or requests can be sent
to info at steptools.com.