The extension of STEP PDM Schema for information sharing in a practical application

Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC) enhances corporate competency by helping companies to share the product data internationally along the whole product life cycle. Sharing product data requires integrated database and a proper design of data model for information exchange. Since the information exchange in general occurs through documents and the documents contain product-related data, integrated database is to be designed by analyzing the content of documents. The documents are also used as the unit of information exchanges, so the data model for information exchanges is to be designed through the modelling of documents. In this paper, we suggest an extension of PDM Schema, an international standard for product data exchange, in order to support CPC environment. We analyze the product development process and the documents involved in it. From the analysis, we define the functions that are needed in CPC but not included in PDM Schema, and then design an appropriate information model. In addition, we define an information model by modelling the documents which are the unit of information exchanges. We also define an interpreted model so that the added functions and information model can be used together with the existing PDM Schema.