OT: CAD (was Re: [Twisted-Python] Re: In Defense of Taps)

[Moshe Zadka]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Steve Waterbury <waterbug at beeblebrox.gsfc.nasa.gov> wrote:

> An important piece of this puzzle is the STEP (ISO 10303) standard for 
> "Product Model Data", which is a set of information models of the various 
> types of data I mentioned above.  STEP itself is very complex (and not 
> pretty, but it's really the only game in town for multi-disciplinary 
> engineering data integration and it is taken very seriously by all large 
> manufacturing organizations ... the list of organizations using/developing 
> STEP is a who's who of manufacturers:  Ford, GM, Daimler-Chrysler, Boeing, 
> Lockheed-Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, etc.), so one of the constraints 
> on PGEF is to be able to map between STEP's information models and the PGEF 
> repository schema ... if you browse the comments in createPgerDbTables.sql, 
> many refer to how things map to/from STEP.

STEP pretty much sucks for data-exchange, for a number of reasons. The primary
reason is that STEP loses the "design information", so that editing it is
about as fun as debugging programs by fixing their .o representations.
I don't know of any free solution, but Proficiency
(http://www.proficiency.com/products/product_overview.html) is working
in this area -- and their very existence is a testimony to STEP suckage.

-- 
Moshe Zadka -- http://moshez.org/
Buffy: I don't like you hanging out with someone that... short.
Riley: Yeah, a lot of young people nowadays are experimenting with shortness.