ISO Industry day in Hershey: The Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) Metrology Project Team (MEPT) and the International Standards Organization (ISO) Technical Committee 184 (TC184) for STEP Manufacturing held a joint meeting on Wednesday Oct 25th in the context of a broader set of meetings of the ISO held during the week of the 25th in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Akram Yunas of the AIAG MEPT called for the meeting. John Horst (MEPT and NIST), Akram Yunas (AIAG), and Martin Hardwick (TC184 and STEPtools) defined the agenda and procured appropriate speakers. The audience at the joint meeting consisted of about 20 - 30 attendees, mostly ISO TC184 (STEP Manufacturing) committee workers from Sweden, Germany, Japan, France, Korea, Australia, and the US, along with AIAG MEPT representatives. The purposes of the joint meeting were 1) for the MEPT and the TC184 to inform one another of activities that were perceived to be of interest to the other, 2) to discuss possible joint or individual tasks to encourage mutually beneficial activity between the two organizations, and 3) (particularly) to begin to define a set of phased stages of the implementation Geometrical Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) concepts using an appropriate open, non-proprietary standard (probably one or several of the existing ISO STEP standards). The latter purpose was key, since both organizations believe that the implementation of an open, non-proprietary standard for CAD + Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) downstream to machining, inspection, casting, forging, etc. is the main missing element for realizing cost savings from interoperability. In light of the former purpose, Robert Waite (MEPT and Daimler Chrysler), John Horst (MEPT and NIST), John Coski (MEPT and Daimler Chrysler), and Steve Peca (MEPT and Ogihara) presented the work of the AIAG MEPT. Waite presented an overview of MEPT and the work on DML, Horst presented the standards development model of the MEPT and relevant results from the International Metrology Interoperability Summit (IMIS) 2006, Coski presented the new Quality Measurement Data (QMD) standard, and Peca presented work on a Scan Data specification. On the TC184 side, Christine Hermetet-Filez of AFNOR in France gave an Airbus presentation on its requirements for tolerances in next generation CNC machining. Martin Hardwick of STEP Tools, Inc. gave a demonstration of the results of a closed loop machining test using AP-203 Edition 2 tolerance data prepared by Boeing, and an Okuma machine tool with a probing system owned by Boeing. In light of the latter purpose, Len Slovensky (TC184 and Northrop Grumman) presented GD&T in the context of the various STEP Application Profile (AP) standards, like AP224, AP219, and AP238. All of these STEP standards are targeted to non-inspection operations, excepting AP219, which does address inspection, but is limited to inspection results reporting. It became clear that the several standards/specifications under the oversight of the MEPT, namely, I++ DME, DMIS, DML, QMD, and Scan Data, will generally fit well within the context of the appropriate STEP APs, with some overlap. It has been identified that a key item of joint effort is to enable and encourage the implementation by CAD vendors and process planning vendors of CAD + PMI data sufficient for process planning in an open, non-proprietary format that is complete, correct, and unambiguous. Presentations were given by a variety of GD&T-for-inspection-application experts, to define phases of implementation for GD&T for inspection. A presentation by Bill Tandler (Multi Metrics), delivered by Ray Admire, dovetailed in with the other related presentations by Curtis Brown and Kim Summerhays, both delivered by Gordon Hogg (Dimensional Metrology Standards Consortium (DMSC) and Daimler Chrysler) and Lockheed Martin (delivered by Ray Admire). The audience appeared to be most interested in these presentations. That interest was again evidenced by discussion following the meeting, at which it was suggested that NIST attempt to get the metrology and GD&T community to agree to a common definition of phases for stages of GD&T implementation for inspection using the efforts begun in preparation for this meeting.