EXPRESS to OWL: a first step for "STEP modules as ontologies"

Abstract

ISO10303 STEP has been acknowledged by the worlds largest industrial companies, as the most important family of standards for the integration and exchange of product data under manufacturing domains. With the advent of globalization, smaller enterprises (SMEs) looking to level up with world-class competitors and raise their effectiveness are also realizing the importance of the usage of this kind of standards. However, to enable a model-based interoperability, STEP industrial standards, the Application Protocols (APs) follow a modular approach, i.e. they are composed by a set of generic purpose modules sharable by a number of different APs. This way, the core STEP reference models contain vague definitions that sometimes raise ambiguous interpretations. A possible solution to overcome this barrier would be to add further semantics to the concepts defined and enable STEP modules as ontologies, thus providing an alternative to traditional implementations. SMEs can benefit even more from this alternative, since OWL is currently a widespread technology, with abundant low cost supporting tools comparing to the ones dealing directly with STEP.