A Collaborative 3D Environment for Authoring Design Semantics

Environment for Authoring Design Semantics Design is a ubiquitous human activity and a critical aspect of many modern industries. CAD tools have revolutionized product development in the automotive and aerospace (mechanical CAD) and architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries, as well as other areas where geometric computation and visualization have proven essential. Presently, however, design and manufacturing industries from across this spectrum are shifting toward distributed and both geometrically and knowledgeintensive collaborative environments. It’s becoming increasingly common for design teams to be separated geographically. While the existing generation of CAD environments and product data management systems provide an excellent set of tools for individual authoring of geometry, topology, constraints, and database synchronization of these entities, they don’t yet support true collaborative authoring of design semantics. Design semantics—that is, grounded representations of product and process knowledge—are becoming vitally important for creating the next generation of knowledge-intensive CAD applications. This article presents an approach to collaborative authoring of design semantics within a multiuser 3D environment. Our research unites ideas from traditional engineering design with recent work from the Semantic Web and knowledge engineering community. The system we present, Multiuser Groups for Conceptual Understanding and Prototyping (MUG), serves as our research platform. It lets a team of designers—collaborating over the Internet in a shared, multimodal, 3D workspace—model a 3D layout and semantically grounded behavioral description of a product or device. Specific aspects of our approach include