In Part 10, I claimed “the future of CAD is cooperative”. This might seem obvious, but one look at current ongoing difficulties reveals the magnitude of the non-cooperative problem. It’s an inconvenient fact of life for too many of us and the reason I spent so much time examining the ongoing shift in the CAD industry; a shift which is arguably a result of efforts to circumvent artificial barriers and market reactions arising from those efforts. However, having spent a fair portion of that time discussing two of the three roadblocks – data portability and proprietary formats – I want to briefly touch on the third: extensible semantics.
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This is probably a good time for a brief, updated review.

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In my last entry I said I’d post some examples of recent developments in the CAD arena. So without further delay, here are some items which caught my attention.

Dassault CATIA V6

What’s notable about the forthcoming release of CATIA is the continued aggressive push towards a virtual interface along the lines of Microsoft Earth. From MCAD Online (Link): Continue reading →

I previously offered (reLink) that there were three issues of particular relevance to the future evolution of “next generation” 3D CAD applications:

My last entry, in which I discussed the emergence of “direct modeling” 3D CAD, was still very much about data portability. While I’d previously confessed to “largely ignoring the trend toward ‘direct modeling’ “, the truth is that in researching next generation solutions I found I couldn’t ignore the trend. And this is because the direct modeling segment of the 3D CAD market is solving the kinds of data portability issues which is frustrating so many users.

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First let me confess to not having paid sufficient attention to the “direct modeling” wave that’s flooding the CAD market. While the technique isn’t new, it’s made substantial gains in recent years… both in the release of some interesting new modeling applications (e.g. SpaceClaim) and noteworthy upgrades (e.g. Siemens NX5), as well as in significant investments (e.g. PTC acquiring CoCreate in Dec 2007).
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