(QMD)
The information incompatibility problem in manufacturing metrology is costly to everyone. The standards solution eliminates these costs, as long as there is end user support and the standard and its implementations are verifiably correct, complete, unambiguous, and timely.

The scope of this industry-led effort is on the exchange of information between quality measurement-related activities such as design, planning, measurement, analysis, and process feedback.

NIST’s role is:

• To help define correct, complete, and unambiguous interface standards
• To design, build, and maintain conformance tests
• To help design and lead public interoperability tests
• To act as standards consultants and leaders in industry standards organizations

The incompatibility problem for quality measurement systems
The information necessary to ensure product and process quality on the shop floor consists of many different types of information: measurement equipment commands, dimensional measurement results (point clouds, scanned points, probe points, portable device data, etc.), general quality measurement data (measurement value, date, time, lot number, part IDs, etc.), measurement equipment types (CMMs, in-line gauges, hand-held gauges, white-light scanners, laser trackers, etc.), measurement process plans, part geometries, feature geometries, feature dimensions and tolerances.

Manufacturing measurement can be broken down the following set of distinct quality measurement activities:

• Product Design [CAD + PMI (Product Manufacturing Information)]
• Measurement Process Planning
• Measurement Plan Execution
• Measurement Equipment Control
• Product Quality Analysis

A multitude of products are currently available to perform each activity.  Each product claims some uniqueness or superiority in the performance of its activity. This provides freedom and choice to users. However, there is a downside to the abundance of product choices– language barriers abound.  Each product reads and writes the same information communicated by its competitors, but in its own unique language. Unless neighboring products come from the same vendor, costly translation is required, and translation is completely non-value-added. As if that weren’t enough, translation diminishes information quality.

Information exchange standards will solve this language barrier problem with a modest investment of time, effort, and patience– all without the high costs associated with other approaches.
From- www.nist.gov