RE: Re: SEMIS Bulletin
I'd like to contribute a little background on the subject of STEP and EXPRESS and the development goals of these standards to add to what John has said below:
> The STEP group focused on the much bigger problem of using the
> entire infrastructure (including the web) in order to put semantic
> modeling at the center of every aspect of the business process,
> including hardware and software design, development, manufacturing,
> distribution, and communication with clients and suppliers. I'll
> admit that there's more to the elephant, but STEP started with
> the brain and included a much bigger chunk than just the tail.
I do think that STEP has a long lead in trying to do the kinds of things that are described as goals of the SW, but it didn't have an "entire infrastructure" focus. The objective of STEP was to define a standard data format for (initially) exchanging a complete product specification between hetergeneous CAD/CAM systems (though the objectives have grown substantially over the years). Although it had an integrative architecture (with respect to the data), it was fundamentally source-to-target data exchange standard (i.e., a "standard vocabulary") and did not include broader network architecture concerns. Except for a few parts of the standard (dealing with APIs and Java), it was almost exclusively about data. (STEP grew out of effort called IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification), which was designed to exchange computer graphics geometry between geometric modelling systems.) The industrial sectors that contributed to STEP were principally manufacturing concerns and t!
heir technology suppliers (and largely defense-related).
EXPRESS is billed as an "information modelling" language, but is basically (IMHO) just a data modelling language. It is a synthesis of object and ER modelling concepts and does not have any formal logic basis - or at least that was not a design intent. That EXPRESS has the power of FOL (as John observes) I am guessing is a by-product of the ER/relational influence on the language design. There are no STEP reasoners in the AI/OWL sense that I am aware of because the language was not designed for this purpose.
One point I will strongly echo from my STEP experience is Pete Kirkham's observation: the SW/W3C community has no idea how difficult it is to obtain agreement on a common understanding of the meaning of elements of a data standard.
There are others on this list with STEP/EXPRESS backgrounds, so I would invite them to add to or comment on my assessment here - which is purely my own view.
For those interested in the STEP information architecture, I have an old but not completely-outdated paper on the subject at http://www.intergate.com/~wcb/ewc.pdf that appeared in Engineering With Computers in 1995. (The graphics are bad in this copy, though - this was done many years ago and I've never updated it with more powerful and capable technology.)
Bill