Long Term Archiving with STEP

The design and management of industrial objects generate large volumes of data, which serve as a reference throughout their lifecycle, which can extend over several decades, during which applications and hardware evolve rapidly. In addition to access during all phases of design, industrialization, certification and maintenance activities, as long as products are in operation, regulations increasingly require a reference as contractual data.

Hence, archiving product data and making them available for the needs of further work poses a challenge and not only with regards to regulatory restraints : it's not just a matter of providing access to current CAD files.

This has motivated industrial actors to address the concern of long term archiving of product data. The LOTAR group (for LOng Term ARchiving) has been created to develop and promote a standard for the long-term archiving of digital product data. It has been initially created and animated by areospace industrial companies. The objective of the group is to establish methods, processes and a data model for archiving 3D geometry data and product structure information.

To do so, STEP was chosen for its advantages in data archiving: STEP enables data to be described in a standardized, independent and extensible way, already widely used in industry. To improve the use of STEP for data archiving, the LOTAR group is liaising with the forums working on STEP, especially the CAx-IF forum, to ensure that data exchange solutions support long-term archiving requirements. This involves specifying archiving requirements for product data, proposing extensions to existing STEP descriptions, providing test cases for CAx-IF testing activities, promoting pilot projects designed to validate specification proposals and support their implementation in marketed exchange and archiving tools.

In work to extend STEP's long-term archiving capabilities, especially the case coverage of data associated with 3D models such as PMI, Datakit provides its expertise in CAD data exchanges in the LOTAR work shops : on mapping of PMI data between native CAD data and STEP, on binding between their semantic data (which bring the real information) and their graphical presentation (to be displayed).

Source: LOTAR international

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