When the
work on PLIB was initiated, one major way of information exchange between
components users and components manufacturers was at the catalogue level:
manufacturers catalogues were sent to customers, either in paper or in
electronic form, at regular periods of time. For this kind of exchange,
a file of EXPRESS instances, known as a STEP physical file, appeared well
suited.
With the growth of the Internet, of e-commerce and of B2B procurement applications, several levels of granularity of information exchange between components users and components manufacturers appeared. Moreover, XML emerged as the most popular file structure for exchanging over the Internet. Thus, it became desirable to allow PLIB information exchange using XML.
Considering the information flows between companies involved in pilot PLIB implementation projects, and in particular in the JEMIMA project in Japan, three levels of information exchange, often separated, appeared:
- Exchanging whole or part of PLIB Dictionary.
- Exchanging explicit populations referencing some pre-existing dictionary.
- Exchanging instances data.
These DTDs were developed as a joint research effort of TOSHIBA and LISI/ENSMA. They are intended to be used by TOSHIBA as exchange formats for its new PLIB commercial service. It is not currently planed to propose these DTDs for standardisation. But both TOSHIBA and LISI/ENSMA want to promote the use of these DTDs for e-engineering based on PLIB. Therefore these DTDs are freely available from the PLIB home site , or from the Toshiba pilot PLIB site.
Download
The SimPLIB DTDs are availlable for downloading.- SimPLIBDic DTD
- The purpose of the first DTD is to capture and to exchange data dictionary descriptions. This DTD covers all the PLIB data dictionary features (parts families and properties descriptions). It provides for referencing standardised/external data dictionary descriptions. Finally this DTD is capable of supporting descriptions of assemblies of parts. <example>
- SimPLIBExt DTD
- This second DTDs is oriented toward the exchange of parts family extension conforming to some referenced data dictionary descriptions. It is completely based on the explicit representation of parts families extensions. It allows the exchange of multiple parts families extensions coming from different parts manufacturers. <example>
- SimPLIBinst DTD
- The last, but not least, DTD is intended to exchange data description of single components. For instance, it may be used as an exchange format for downloading descriptions of components selected on a supplier site into a specific product data management system. This DTD has been designed on the basis of the PLIB data model for representing individual components information. <example>