ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34 N0027

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC34

Information Technology ---

Document Description and Processing Languages

TITLE:	Liaison Report: ISO TC184/SC4, The STEP Family of Standards
SOURCE:
PROJECT:	All SC34 projects
PROJECT EDITOR:
STATUS:
ACTION:	For information
DATE:	13 November 1998
DISTRIBUTION:	SC34 and Liaisons
REFER TO:
REPLY TO:	Dr. James David Mason (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 Chairman) Lockheed Martin Energy Systems Information Management Services 1060 Commerce Park, M.S. 6480 Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6480 U.S.A. Telephone: +1 423 574-6973 Facsimile: +1 423 574-0004 Network: masonjd@ornl.gov http://www.ornl.gov/sgml/wg4/ ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/wg4/

Liaison Report

TC184/SC4 met in June in Bad Aibling, Germany and again in October in Beijing, China. The STEP and SGML effort progressed significantly. In addition, a new work item for the development of an XML/SGML representation of STEP interchange files was approved and work started. The following things have been accomplished:

An EXPRESS model of the SGML property set was developed to a reasonable degree of completeness.
An EXPRESS model of the HyTime property grove was developed, reflecting the location addressing and hyperlinking modules.
A preliminary property set template and generation algorithm for creating groves from repositories of STEP-driven data was developed.
At the Bad Aibling meeting, a session of demonstrations showing the use of XML to represent STEP data was held.
A set of requirements for input to the XML Schema effort was developed of the XML representation of STEP data new work item and forwarded to the W3C for consideration.

Other STEP activities of potential interest include:

Work continues on a new part of the STEP standard, EXPRESS-X, which is a mapping language defined to define the mapping between both schemas and data instances. This language bears many similarities to the transformation language of DSSSL. There may be some interesting synergies between these two standards, at least in the area of sharing ideas and requirements, if not in the area of literal cooperation.
A second edition of the EXPRESS language is being developed. This edition adds a number of useful features, including a behavior description model. It may also include features that would make the STEP representation of named node lists more direct.

In general, interest in the STEP and SGML effort seems to be positive and sustained. We have gotten significant support from the SC4 leadership. We have developed productive working relationships with other working groups.

Planned activities:

The primary work items continue to be developed and refined. Our goal is to have them firm enough by the next STEP meeting in January 1999 to enable the creation of non-trivial demonstrations.
Our goal is to develop demonstration implementations for presentation at the June, 1999 STEP meeting. We may have some of these demonstrations available for the April XML conference in Granada, Spain.
We will work on documenting and formalizing our work products. We are not yet clear on what standardized form, if any, these different work products should take or what standardization group would be most appropriate.

Upcoming actions:

Next TC184/SC4 meeting is in January in San Francisco.

Additional information: http://www.nist.gov/sc4.