DMSC Marketing Chair Ray Stahl sat down with QIF 4.0 Project Manager Tom Kramer to review the most common questions asked during QIF 4.0 Working Group sessions.
Following is a recap of their discussion.
• Optical digitizer measurement devices are being added to QIF measurement resources. An optical digitizer creates clouds of 3D points. Other additions and improvements to the model of measurement devices will also be made.
• Using ISO or other standards is being made easier by allowing assigning a standard at a finer level of detail. QIF 4.0 will have a hierarchy of standard assignments in which an assignment at a greater level of detail overrides any assignment at a coarser level.
• The digital thread is being better enabled by improving the use of UUIDs. In particular, it will be possible, for any reference to a UUID, to add a reference to the source of the UUID. Also, the assignment of a new UUID is more clearly distinguished from a reference to an existing UUID. In connection with this, the QIF-specific synonym for UUID, QPId, is being removed.
• The handling of QIF constraints is being improved:
o By using XSLT to duplicate constraints in the formal (XSDL) model, the need to pay for an app to check that an XML file conforms to the QIF model is being eliminated. Almost every computer comes with an XSLT processor, and free XSLT processors are readily available.
o More constraints that can be written in XSDL are being added.
o More constraints that cannot be written in XSDL are being added to the XSLT checks.
o Errors in the XSDL constraints are being eliminated using software that checks for errors.
• QIF will be changed so that most items in the new DMSC’s Model-Based Characteristics standard (MBC 1.0) are also part of QIF.
• Several kinds of units are modeled by name in QIF (e.g., length, angle). QIF 4.0 will make it possible, in addition, to use any combination of SI units.
• The QIF plan model will be upgraded. Revision of the plan model has not started yet.
Legend:
QIF = Quality Information Framework
QPid = UUID In QIF 4.0 the term QPid will be replaced with UUID.
XSDL = XML Schema Definition Language
XSLT = Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (but nobody says the full name). It’s a Turing-complete programming language, i.e., you can do almost anything with data.
For more information about the development of QIF 4.0, contact DMSC Executive Director Mark Thomas by email.
