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CAD Vendors Take the Stand in Their Interoperability Defense
excerpted from
Full article is available for a fee
Peter Heath, June
25, 2007
The second day of RAPID’s side conference, “Interoperability and 3D
Collaboration” was more about the vendor’s point of view. The day
started with a panel of CAD vendors. Interoperability specialist David
Prawel of
Longview Advisors, who
helps organize the event each year moderated. Vendor panelists were
Kevin Schneider, Autodesk; Graham McHenry, Cimmetry; Scott Hibner,
Actify; Asa Trainer, PTC; Aaron Kelly, SolidWorks; Dr. Jim Gordon,
Kubotek. Andy Reilly of Dassault Systemes was scheduled but unable to
attend. Each vendor was asked to describe their view of openness.
Kelly said SolidWorks offers a mature API for available for any data
that is required. Trainer of PTC noted that they are committed to a wide
variety of openness directions. Schneider said Autodesk provides APIs in
Autodesk Inventor to get at the data and (of course) supports DWG for
data exchange and DWF for collaboration. Hibner said Actify, as a viewer
tool, must be able to directly read many different file formats, and
they do so. Gordon said Kubotek has the typical suite of translators,
which the company needs if they are to be successful at providing a CAD
tool suitable for editing data for downstream applications.
AP203E2, Anyone?
AP203E2 support was the topic of the next discussion. Each of the
vendors planned some level of support. Several of the vendors count on
third parties for their STEP translators and therefore deferred to those
suppliers business plans. PTC was clearly committed to STEP and to
supporting the STEP environment including CAx test cases. SolidWorks
also will support E2 but as with the rest of the vendors, the timeframe
was not clear. The bottom line is that customers have moved beyond
geometry and feature discussions and are now focused on GD&T and other
downstream manufacturing information. Lightweight Data Exchange
Formats
David Prawel hosted the final session of the conference, a vendor
panel on lightweight data exchange format. In this context,
‘lightweight’ refers to file size. The following vendors (and products)
were represented:
- Doug Halliday, Adobe Systems (Adobe PDF, both 2D and 3D)
- Bill Barnes, Lattice Technologies (Dassault’s 3D XML which uses
Lattice XVL)
- Hilde Sevens, Autodesk (Autodesk DWF)
- Aaron Kelly, SolidWorks (eDrawings)
- Andy Reilly, Dassault Systems (3D XML)
JT, another important data exchange format offered by UGS, was not
represented in this panel.
Panelists generally agreed that STEP has value as an archival format,
but it was also clear that all of the vendors saw their own format as a
valid archive for 2D data.
Read more:
- Semantic Analysis Scoring at Honeywell
- Proficiency, Stage Two
- Final Thoughts on Interoperability
The
full article is available for a fee at CADCAMNet. |
