Better STEP, a format and dataset for boundary representation

Boundary representation (B-rep) generated from computer-aided design (CAD) is widely used in industry, with several large datasets available. However, the data in these datasets is represented in STEP format, requiring a CAD kernel to read and process it. This dramatically limits their scope and usage in large learning pipelines, as it constrains the possibility of deploying them on computing clusters due to the high cost of per-node licenses. This dataset introduces an alternative format based on the open, cross-platform format HDF5 and a corresponding dataset for STEP files. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the format, we converted the Fusion 360 dataset and the ABC dataset. For more information visit https://better-step.github.io