Will your descendents be able to read your CAD drawings 50 years from now?

Three CAD vendors -- Lattice, Elysium, and Kubotek -- are partnering with Boeing to present a half-day seminar later this month on the problems of dealing with 3D CAD data.

The conference has the unhappily-long title of "Improve Aerospace Supply Chain Quality and Productivity with Proven Best-in-Class 3D Software," and clearly the three feel their software fits that best-in-class category. Still, the problems of CAD data reuse and dealing with longterm archiving is of interest to me.

Anyhow, the free seminar is March 25 in Seattle WA, which makes for a nice two-hour drive down the I-5 for me (and my wife, who'll come along for the shopping). I hope to live blog the event.

More info here: lattice3d.com/news_seminar.html

Comments

[David Flood]

Still, the problems of CAD data reuse and dealing with longterm archiving is of interest to me.

Here's something I wrote a while back on the Bentley forums on this same topic, asking for better SVG and COLLADA support:

Conversely, we're also interested in both of the above (along with PDF) as 'open' archival and exchange formats, which, with respect to the good folks at Bentley, isn't necessarily a niche that DGN would be a good fit for (and when I say "archival", our particular organisation has in mind centuries rather than years or even decades - a much longer timeframe than the lives of corporations, never mind technologies).

http://communities.bentley.com/forums/thread/108279.aspx

[J Gerth]

IMHO - the GNU LibreDWG effort is a great first step in making design files readable down the road. The FOSS license ensures that whatever they manage to accomplish will be freely usable as a tool to access today's DWG files in 2062.

A better step though, would be a requirement by all governmental entities that electronic deliverables be submitted in a publicly documented format. Anything submitted to a publicly owned agency should be pbulicly available to the populace without paying fees to private firms for access to closed formats.

[Oleg Shilovitsky]

I recently put some thoughts related to long term data retention - http://plmtwine.com/2009/05/29/plm-how-to-enable-long-term-retention-of-you-product-data/. It will be interesting to compare with the outcome of the meeting in Boeing. Best, Oleg

[cad drawings]

It will be easier to read i think in the furture for people 50 years in the future.