A standard access interface for product data

Integration in the area of product data management systems is still an open topic. Even though various approaches for offline (typically based on STEP) and now also for online integration have been developed, the effort and costs of integration are still too high. What we need in the context of a highly integrated environment or a collaborative virtual environment, including systems such as CAD, CAE, Virtual Reality and tele-cooperation, is an open and powerful approach for exploring and modifying product data. This paper puts forward additional arguments for dealing with this topic in terms of motivation and afterwards presents an approach employing a standard access interface as the core concept. Using previous work from the STEP community, we also define an API which makes integration tasks in a given environment much easier. Based on the presentation of the interface, the paper illustrates usage and advantages of the approach on the basis of two application scenarios: federation of PDM systems and integration of PDM and Virtual Reality. The paper ends with a summary and an outlook on future work.