The integration of lightweight representation and annotation for collaborative design representation

Today companies face the unprecedented challenges of a global market, collaborative environments and the concept of management of the entire product life cycle. In supporting this, the challenge is not only how to utilize information management policies, but also how to develop product representation methods to meet the new demands including platform/application independence, support for the product lifecycle, assisting generation of viewpoint-specific representations, rapid sharing of information between geographically distributed applications and users, and protection of commercial security (intellectual property). This paper proposes a product representation approach using the strengths of lightweight representation and annotation and markup practices to allow the association of product data from throughout the lifecycle with the geometric form of the product. The approach, called Lightweight Model with Multi-layer Annotation (LIMMA), integrates the concept of lightweight representation with annotation of boundary-representations (b-rep) of a product and the use of a formalised markup language (XML). Examples of annotation layers and development of models through-life are given, based on the LIMMA approach.