Examining CAD Interoperability through the Use of Ontologies

AbstractProduct data interoperability in CAD systems has become one of the key areas of concern for collaboration of work and integration of product data through various phases of a product lifecycle. In this paper, we propose a framework which uses an ontology to bridge the data interoperability gap between various CAD software systems allowing these systems to interact with each other during a product’s lifecycle. An ontology is created from the native file from a CAD system through an intermediate standard format, STEP. The ontology represents the geometric product data from the CAD file and the semantics of the product data. The ontology is converted back into a STEP file to be used by another CAD system. This could be an open source alternative to expensive proprietary software packages used for this type of data conversion.