Annotation of lightweight formats for long-term product representations

Companies operating in today’s global economy are increasingly expected to manage the entire lifecycle of their products, and are finding advantage in a distributed, collaborative working style. Existing three-dimensional computer aided design (CAD) systems are not well adapted to this way of working, however. This paper highlights some limitations in the current applications, and presents a framework for overcoming them based on three strands of current research: lightweight representations, the annotation of CAD models, and representation information as defined by the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (ISO 14721:2003). In the proposed framework, a ‘stand-off’ method is used to layer information, in the form of annotations, on top of both CAD models and lightweight representations alike. These annotations can be circulated independently of the geometry, facilitating more flexible information flow across the whole product lifecycle. The approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study.