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SST - Semantic STEP Technology
SST - Semantic STEP Technology

News

News
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2026-04-27: DCT Co. Ltd., China, and SST GmbH, Germany, release together SST-Core v1.0.0 and make it available under a dual licensing model, consisting of commercial licenses and the POLYFORM Noncommercial 1.0.0 license. The sources are available on https://github.com/semanticstep/sst-core .

SST stands for Semantic STEP Technology. SST-Core is a toolkit for the development of applications with a focus on industrial product data as created and managed by CAD, CAM, PDM, PLM, LSA, ERP, Process- and Manufacturing-Planning systems.

SST-Core has a novel architecture that allows the use of Semantic Web standards RDF/S, OWL, Turtle, TriG in a performance optimized way that is suitable for cloud computing and able to drive e.g. web applications. SST Repositories allow distributed storage and replication of data on the Internet with full revision control. With integrated GIT functionality it is always possible to analyze the history of each Dataset to answer the question of who, when, what, why of each change.

SST-Core provides higher level ontologies for industrial product data that integrate modelling concepts from other international standards together in a unified single level data model; thus bridging between major incompatibilities between these standards, including:

  • Life-cycle Integration (LCI) as defined in the ISO 15926 series for process plants including oil and gas production facilities
  • STEP, the STandard for the Exchange of Product model data, ISO 10303 series;
  • IEC Common Data Dictionary (CDD), including IEC 61360-4 for electric/electronic components
  • ISO/IEC 81346 Standard Series on Reference Designation System (RDS)
  • ASD S3000L on Logistic Support Analysis (LSA)
  • ISO/IEC 80000 on Quantities and Units

DCT Co. Ltd., and SST GmbH are working together to release the end-user web application SST-EDM which stands for “Engineering Data Management” later in 2026. SST-EDM runs on top of SST-Core and will step by step implement many of the capabilities listed here.

History
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The development of a Semantic STEP Technology started back in early 2021 after several major decisions where taken by Lothar Klein on how to create a complete new framework for all kinds of CAx related applications hosted on the web. These decisions are based on his almost 40 years of software development experiences on CAD, CAM and PDM/PLM systems and the experiences with the development of data exchange and integration standards, primarily on EDIF and STEP within ISO TC184/SC4. The main decissions where:

  • GO as the main server side programming language. Previous systems Lothar implemented uses Java (JSDAI and IDA-STEP), C/C++ (CircuitCAM), Pascal (ColorCAM)
  • RDF/S as the basis to store all application data and higher level ontologies, and Turtle to visualize this data. Unlike other formats such as STEP Express and p21 format, relational databases, linked data databases, XML, Json and others misses the capabilities that are provided by using the full power of RDF/S.
  • For performance reasons to use NamedGraph (that can contain many triples) as the main objects for persistent data storage in a database - and to separate this from querying needs for which a separate database with derived data that is optimized for any kind of index needed. This is the opposite approach to RDF and Linked Data storage solutions that uses SPARQL as the main access mechanism.
  • Triplex structure in memory that enable to traverse graphs of RDF triples in any direction at high speed:
    • from subject to predicate and object
    • from object nodes to predicate and subject
    • from predicate to subject and object
  • To use OWL as logical basis for data modelling; but not to rely on general purpose reasoning/inferencing with Open World assumption. Instead require for each node (IRI and blank ones) to explicitly state of which type it is to allow validation based on the Closed World assumption
  • Use of OWL 2 that introduces owl:imports by which it can be explicitly stated which NamedGraph belong to a Dataset that defines this Closed World for validation
  • GIT like revision control capabilities on the basis of NamedGraphs with full commit, branch, diff and merge capabilities.
  • “early binding support” to make key classes and properties directly accessible as GO objects; simplifying the development of e.g. converters significantly.

In Mai 2023 a first stable pre-release of basic SST-Core functionality was release to an industrial customer who uses it in a productive web application. Since then the programming interface has been significantly optimized and missing capabilities where added.

Implementation Status
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With this SST-Core v1.0.0 release the following components of SST-Core are considered to be stable and ready for productive use:

  • main library functionality in package git.semanticstep.net/x/sst/sst
  • SST Repository, local and remote
  • SST Ontology Compiler and the generated early binding support
  • SST CLI - Command Line Interface

The following components are currently in draft state:

  • higher level SST Ontologies such as lci, sso, rep
  • STEP import and export in p21 and XML format
  • Diff and merge functionality