An innovative infrastructure for inter-working between dissimilar edm solutions

The paper gives an overview of the European Esprit Condor project (ESPRIT 23105). The project aims at providing a large range of industrial areas, including the Construction industry, with an innovative infrastructure for distributing information and achieving co-operative work between heterogeneous Electronic Document Management (EDM) legacy systems, while ensuring document consistency throughout ongoing projects. The paper, first, presents the proposed technical solution, and gives a comprehensive description of the Application Programming Interface supporting the proposed inter-working and semantic linking services. The paper also includes a brief description of the modelling infrastructure supporting the proposed Condor system. Finally, a demonstrator involving the AutoCAD application, along with the Electronic Document Management systems used within the project, is presented. The latter demonstrates the Condor semantic-linking services. The project is ongoing and supported by a user interest group, which involves representatives from a variety of non-construction industry companies all over Europe.