Interoperability, collaboration, inspection, quality, standards, proprietary data, neutrality, competition, and innovation – these are words and realities that all manufacturers deal with daily. Over the years there have been myriad attempts to bring this stuff together, all while protecting IP. However, as we know, while the attempts to make this happen have often been valiant, too often they have fallen well short, or worse, failed altogether.

That failure may be on its way to being a thing of the past with the advent of the Quality Information Framework (QIF), an ANSI standard that supports digital thread concepts in engineering applications ranging from product design through manufacturing. Based on the XML standard, it contains a Library of XML Schema ensuring both data integrity and data interoperability in Model Based Enterprise (MBE) implementations.
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