Industry Sectors A unified approach toward Product Data Technology is evolving across practically all industrial sectors. Then all application-specific, higher level concepts are required to be described in terms of these resources by appropriate mappings. The founding of the product models on the same pool of resources is a major prerequisite for the consistency and interoperability of the resulting application-specific information models. The product model world in STEP is the sum of all standardised, partly independent schemas. The standard remains open and extensible.
STEP thus serves as a neutral medium for exchanging and sharing data.
Product model data instances are interpreted and verified with reference to the conceptual models and subsequently converted into any other desired formats. This is doen by STEP processors. They usually consist of commercially available STEP toolkits and of system-dependent software. The introduction of STEP based methods and systems in Product Data Technology will continue to require major investments of time and cost as well as strategic organisational changes. These efforts must be justified by commensurate economic benefits.