Access STEP Data From any Application on any Platform

Open Design Alliance (ODA), provider of complete interoperability solutions for CAD and BIM, has released a new STEP SDK (Software Development Kit) for accessing STEP data. STEP is the exchange standard defined by ISO 10303 for representing and communicating digital product information, and is widely supported by many mechanical CAD applications as a neutral standard for data exchange, ODA reports.

“Our goal is to be the leading provider of SDKs for open standards,” says Neil Peterson, ODA president. “As an alliance, ODA has the best business model and licensing terms in the industry. And we have deep experience with the STEP physical file format from developing our solution for IFC, the international exchange standard for BIM.

“The release of STEP SDK establishes ODA as a critical provider of mechanical exchange technologies, and it opens significant opportunities for our member companies in this market,” Peterson says.

The new ODA STEP SDK offers the following features:

• Support for the AP203, AP214, AP238, AP242 and CIS/2 schemas
• Runtime schema initialization from the EXPRESS file
• Access to all metadata defined by the EXPRESS schema
• SDAI (Standard Data Access Interface) API
• C++ late-bound API

Advanced creation, visualization, .NET support and other features are under development and will be released later this year.

Availability and Pricing

The new STEP SDK is included as part of the standard ODA membership offering, and is available to all ODA members at no additional fee. More information about STEP SDK can be found here. 

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.