STEP Data Warehousing

Metabula's STEP Data Warehousing (SDW) capabilities have been developed primarily from its DataManage product capability.

The DataManage product was acquired from Quillion Limited, and has been supporting STEP data warehouse solutions for over 7 years, having been previously know as PETS.

A STEP Data Warehouse provides a set of capabilities to be able to import, manage, control, and export information held according to a specific STEP data model.

STEP or the STandard for the Exchange of Product model data is the name more commonly given to the family of ISO 10303 standards.

As explained by the following definition from wikipedia,"..It is an International Standard for the computer-interpretable representation and exchange of industrial product data. The objective is to provide a mechanism that is capable of describing product data throughout the life cycle of a product, independent from any particular system. The nature of this description makes it suitable not only for neutral file exchange, but also as a basis for implementing and sharing product databases and archiving."

History

There is a long history to the creation of ISO 10303 with much of the work in the creation of the standard being completed by companies related to the Process industries (i.e. Oil, Gas, Chemicals, etc.) who focused upon their specific Application Protocol (AP). This became known as ISO 10303 part 221, or AP221.

As described on the InfowebML site, "The data model of AP221 is different from those used in the other AP's (Application Protocols) in that it is a highly normalized and generic data model, that is data-driven by means of reference to libraries. This has made the integration into the ISO 10303 domain a difficult task, but has been done successfully. These difficulties had to do with a mandatory mapping to the 'Generic Resources' of ISO 10303."

The focus then moved to the management of information according to the 10303-221 model. This included the creation of a standard Reference Data Library (RDL) and Application Reference Model (ARM). These various threads were combined into work on a new standard, ISO 15926. The purpose of ISO 15926 is to facilitate exchange and integration of data to support the lifecycle activities and processes.

Project References

A report on an early experience by Shell in using STEP data warehouse approaches is covered in STEP into The Real World. The paper written in 1998 by Matthew West of Shell Services International, UK detailed the use of STEP on the Shearwater project, which was a £1.5bn North Sea oil development project. The project used is identified as Quillion Limited's PETS product, this is the same product that is now owned by Metabula and sold as Metabula DataManage.

This demonstrated an early success story for the use of STEP. The capabilities developed initially for the Process industries were then applied to other Process projects, as well as to other sectors. An example of the application to other sectors is described in Asset Information Management Strategies for the Railways paper. This was presented by Quillion and Matthew West at the Aspect 99 IRSE International Conference held in London and created interest in a new sector.

In addition, extensive work was undertaken by members of the Metabula team whilst at Quillion on the ESPRIT SEANET project. The project created a virtual-enterprise-wide, Internet-based Product Data Management system that enabled all maritime enterprises to take full advantage of STEP and XML standards for product and process data exchange.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "STEP (ISO 10303)".