Transformation Report: The missing Standard for Data Exchange

The data exchange with STEP ISO 10303 is state of the art, but it is still a fundamental problem to guarantee a given quality of service to integrated operational and informational applications. In STEP there are defined descriptive methods, data specifications, implementation resources and conformance testing, but there is nothing to document how the data is processed. A success report of the mapped data from the source to the target tool is missing. In this paper we introduce a Transformation Report for documenting the data transformation from the source to the target tool. With this report the trustworthiness of the received data can be significantly improved by documenting the data loss, semantic and syntactic errors. With the information in the report it should be possible to infer the proper value to define rules that fix the data after it has been determined to be incorrect or to find a suitable data integrations strategy into a target tool or repository. The intention of the paper is to suggest a standardised Transformation Report, that can be automatically processed and that contains all information for an automated reconciliation process.