Excerpt from The Nist Pdes Toolkit: Technical FundamentalsThe pdes (product Data Exchange using step) activity is the United States' effort in support of the Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (step), an emerging international standard for the interchange of product data between various vendors' cad/cam systems and other manufacturing-related software [smith88]. A National pdes Testbed has been established at the National Institute of Standards and Technol ogy to provide testing and validation facilities for the emerging standard. The Testbed is funded by the cals (computer-aided Acquisition and Logistic Support) program of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. As part of the testing effort, nist is charged with providing a software toolkit for manipulating pdes data. This nist pdes Tool kit is an evolving, research-oriented set of software tools. This document is one of a set of reports which describe various aspects of the Toolkit. An overview of the Toolkit is provided in [clark90a], along with references to the other documents in the set.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.