[step-manufacturing] open access example -- obtaining toolpath parameters

[Vincent Marchetti]

During the Thursday (June 17) morning session/web conference at the  
NIST meeting there was some discussion on "open access" to STEP-NC  
data, particularly for the purpose of obtaining enough information on  
individual workingsteps to enable additional analysis of scheduling  
and line-balancing. Beside the capabilities of the STEP-NC DLL  
library, documented as the Modular Foundry Language, mention was made  
of the SPRI web application that I work on. The basic idea of this web  
application is to present the contents of a STEP file as a collection  
of XML models which are readily searched or viewed with standard web  
techniques. I have put together a web page, at http://www.kshell.com/pages/query_toolpath/index.html 
  , which illustrates how the views already defined for STEP-NC files  
can be processed to extract, for a given toolpath, the feedrate  
specified for that toolpath and a geometric representation of the  
toolpath.

The example  uses XSLT stylesheets and command line (terminal)  
invocations of an XSLT engine (xsltproc); I'd be happy to discuss  
other implementation methods that would be useful for applications.


Vince Marchetti