Background
Before coming to Carnegie Mellon,
I worked at a CAD/CAM reseller/consulting company in Mexico City, and was
able to work with real problems in the CAD industry, involving a wide range
of industries: automotive, chemical, civil, etc.
From this experience, I
can say that one of the most critical issues concerning CAD systems is
data compatibility. You can have the best, most powerful of CAD systems,
but if this system lacks compatibility with your customers' or suppliers'
systems, or with systems within your company, then it's useless.
Each system works with its
own internal data structure. But it must be able to communicate with other
systems for the purposes of: Analysis, Manufacturing, data transmission,
etc.
For these purposes, international
standards have been created: IGES, ACIS, DWG. (Well, DWG is AutoCAD's
drawing format, but it became so widely used that sometimes is considered
a standard). And, in many other cases, you need to convert specifically
from one system's file system to another (example: MicroStation's
.DGN to Cadkey's .PRT)
But, in most cases (I would
say 85% at least), the data conversion from a specified CAD's file system
to one or more of these standards is not 100% good. This is sometimes due
to bugs in the programming, or that one system is not interested in supporting
another system, or that the CAD vendor wants you to buy its newest version
(AutoCAD v13 is not compatible with AutoCAD v12, for example), etc.
I will be back on the CAD
business for sure, and perhaps a business in customizing data translators
can be very productive. So, with this project I want to gain insight on
how to do this. I chose to convert from VRML, well known to all of us which
took the class, to ACIS, which is a solid representation standard.
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