Lightweight Formats for Product Model Data Exchange and Preservation

The designs for engineered products are increasingly defined not by technical drawings but by three-dimensional Computer Aided Design (CAD) models. With rapid turnover of computer hardware and CAD software, these models are in danger of becoming unreadable long before their usefulness has ended. One possible approach is to migrate the models into lightweight formats that are easier to preserve and from which it will be easier to recover information in the future. Such formats also have benefits for design collaboration and dissemination of product model information. Selecting the right lightweight format to use remains a problem, but considering matters of model fidelity, metadata support, security features, file size, sotware support, and openness, the difference between the formats is not as significant as their common advantages over full-featured, complex models