Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools need to cooperate and this can be accomplished by exchanging or sharing meta-data stored in a repository. STEP is an ISO 10303 standard developed to facilitate product information sharing by specifying sufficient semantic content for data and their usage. STEP is providing a dedicated technology, mainly an object oriented modeling language EXPRESS and a standardized data access interface SDAI. Meta-modeling the repository in EXPRESS allows a facilitated cooperation. Both exchange and sharing are provided by the SDAI generated from the EXPRESS meta-schema. Some experiments are related and an industrial project is depicted. Designer/2000 modeling is jointly used with dedicated Visual Basic code generators. Consistency is needed between these two tools families. This is achieved with a simple tool, but the use of the experimental method proposed is still difficult. Impedance mismatch between relational and object database paradigms may be the origin of the difficulties.