Product modeling within the framework of the World Wide Web

This paper presents an approach to the development of an open collaborative design environment in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) setting of a networked enterprise. Demand for high quality and variety of low to medium quality of products or ‘mass customization’ has led to the concept of ‘virtual organizations’. The de-centralized design teams of such an organization require a framework to manage the CAD product information. By integrating the emerging standard for 3D geometry on the World Wide Web with conventional CAD packages, we describe a framework for the development of a product model with various levels of abstractions. The syntactic content of the product model, accessible through any Internet interface such as Netscape Navigator, associates itself with a centralized database for embedding technological information at the face and feature levels. The semantic and syntactic content of the product model can then be accessed and manipulated through the single Internet interface. The system is deployed on a test-bed utilizing both a UNIX box and a machine operating under the Windows NT system, to demonstrate its open architecture and interoperability.