Creating vendor independent parametric knowledge using cad systems

Within the EU project Proficient the open standard CMO with Extensions is developed. This Semantic Web based standard enables storing distributed parametric geometry and is a further development of the standard CMO developed in several other EU projects. An important practical issue within Proficient is to generate the content and knowledge according to this new standard. For clear reasons –in order to ensure the open and unlimited application of the end-users- no new CAD package will be developed as part of the project supporting this new standard. The result is that mainly existing CAD software will have to be used to create content. As a result a conversion from CAD to CMO with Extensions needs to be created. Within the Building & Construction industry all major CAD packages support IFC export. IFC is an open standard with the goal to store the building data for all disciplines in the process, however with only very limited parametric representation power and missing coherent and holistic data. This means that the required parametric knowledge needs to be added afterwards in a dedicated application. An alternative solution is to create a dedicated exporter for CMO within a certain CAD package. Given a powerful enough API and strong enough parametric capabilities this enables modelling the parametric knowledge directly in the CAD package in order to encourage the end users to operate the new system on a well-known software platform. This paper describes the issues we found as well as benefits and drawbacks of conversion from IFC to CMO with Extensions compared to creating a dedicated CAD exporter given that also parametric knowledge needs to be integrated.