Annotation of 3D Lightweight Representations for the Product Lifecycle
Citation
. 2008. ‘Annotation of 3D Lightweight Representations for the Product Lifecycle.’ In: Geometric Modelling Society meeting. University of Bath.
BibTeX format: natbib or biblatex.
Abstract
To survive in the unprecedented competition in the global market, companies must strive to shift traditional centralised working style to a distributed and collaborative environment, and have greater consideration for the management of the entire product lifecycle. This presents new challenges for 3D CAD models, due not only to the communication of model data between geographically dispersed teams and users, but also to the growing problem of accessing old digital 3D CAD models during the whole product lifecycle.
A number of avenues of research are currently being explored in response to these challenges, among them: a) lightweight representations that aim to support users at different stages of the product lifecycle in rapidly browsing, retrieving and manipulating product information; b) the annotation of CAD models with extra information (metadata, application-specific information, etc.) allowing the same data to support multiple viewpoints; and c) collections of representation information that assist in keeping product data readable, understandable and reusable long into the future.
We propose a new approach to integrate the advantages of these three methods in order to address the issues of long-term preservation and the product lifecycle support. We pay particular regard to the capabilities of recent lightweight formats, such as the Project Reviewer Compressed (PRC) format integrated into Portable Document Format (PDF) version 1.7, and their amenability with regards to annotation and documentation. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method, we present some experimental results using annotations with PDF.