Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) based multi-level graphics representation for engineering rich-content exchange in mobile collaboration computing environments

The objective of the current research is to create a novel multi-media computational framework that facilitates mobile collaborative engineering field service. In this paper, we propose a 2D graphics hierarchical representation framework and an ondemand content delivery mechanism. Multi-level graphics content sub-division is utilized to transform large engineering graphics, such as drawings, schematic, plans, circuits, and maps etc., into multiple levels of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content. The hierarchical structure of the SVG content maintains the relationship between the sub-divided content and is formed during the process of sub-division. The divided content is selectively delivered and rendered on the mobile devices in an on-demand fashion. A prototypical system of the proposed approach is implemented and the performance of the framework is evaluated through a series of tests. The test results show significant improvement of performance when the framework is used for representing various engineering graphics contents in a real-world mobile collaborative engineering environment.