Curation and Preservation of Cad Engineering Models in Product Lifecycle Management

During the last decade the management of a product's data over its entire life has been gaining prominence. This is largely due to two factors: firstly, an increasingly collaborative environment in which product development and maintenance takes place in a geographically distributed and networked environment. Secondly, there is an emerging economic paradigm shift in which companies that design and build products are increasingly entering into contracts to provide through-life support for them that is, products are being purchased as services rather than artefacts. For engineering companies, this shift entails a commitment to supporting products over a much longer timeframe than previously expected. At the same time, there is an increasingly greater reliance on CAD models which are now being used as the method for recording definitive product data. However, the CAD software industry is characterised by ephemeral, backwardly incompatible, proprietary applications and file formats which readily become obsolete, making the longterm retention and accessibility of digital product models and data a challenge. We examine the curation and preservation requirements in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and suggest ways of alleviating the problems associated with the sustained representation of CAD engineering models through the use of lightweight formats, layered annotation and the collection of Representation Information as defined in the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model.