Product data representation and exchange The European Commission's Open Information Interchange (OII) service, the objective of which is to provide all market actors with an overview of existing and emerging standards and industry specifications designed to facilitate the exchange of information in electronic form, h... The European Commission's Open Information Interchange (OII) service, the objective of which is to provide all market actors with an overview of existing and emerging standards and industry specifications designed to facilitate the exchange of information in electronic form, has recently published a guide to product data representation and exchange. The aim of the report is to provide a general guide to the standards that are being developed to support the use of a standardised representation for product data that is independent of any computer system. This is in order to address the need to exchange product data between systems that are geographically separated and to retain product data over the lifetime of the product. Problems arise because of the different ways in which systems represent the same product data and therefore the exchange can involve a great deal of effort, delay and uncertainty. The report details an alternative strategy to the one currently used, which uses a standardised representation for the product data that is independent of any computer system. This strategy is now being adopted by the world's largest corporations because it has been proven to increase the reliability of the data exchange process, to reduce the costs involved and to address the problem of archiving. The standards covered in the report are dealt with in four sections and include ISO 10303 for data on individual products, ISO 13584 for data on collections of products, ISO 15531 for parts libraries management data and ISO 15926 for the integration of life cycle data for oil and gas production.
