Abstract
This paper focuses on a procedure for converting product design data from an Initial Graphic Exchange Specification (IGES) format into Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) format. STEP is a new and emerging international standard for product model data exchange (ISO 10303). The STEP standard consists of a set of application protocols. An application protocol is specific to a particular engineering domain. In this case, STEP application protocol 202 was used because it defines the constructs necessary to represent the associative draughting information described by IGES. The translator parses the IGES file and converts it into the corresponding STEP (AP202) format. To test the conformance of the STEP file we have also written code to be able to visualize an Application Protocol 202 (AP202) STEP file. The important elements in this implementation include EXPRESS, C++, ST-Developer and Open inventor Toolkit, available for SGI platforms.