New Alliance Aims for CAD Accessibility Standard

A new alliance has been formed to promote Autodesk's (San Rafael, CA) DWG file format as an open industry standard for exchanging CAD files. The

OpenDWG Alliance (Seattle), an association of vendors and users, will make publicly available the DWG software technology now owned by Visio (Seattle). The OpenDWG Toolkit, a collection of C-language programming libraries that provide read and write access to DWG files, will be made available for free download from the Alliance's Web site. The acceptance and availability of the DWG format will pave the way for integrating CAD data into commercial- or user-developed software tools including document management and database systems. Members of the alliance are: Baystate Technologies (MArlborough, MA), Datacad LLC (Avon, CT), Diehl Graphsoft (Columbia, MD), Eagle Point Software (Dubuque, IA), IMSI (San Rafael, CA), Informative Graphics (Phoenix), Inso (Boston), Intergraph (Huntsville, AL), Ketiv Technologies (Portland, OR), Nemetschek AG (Munich, Germany), Parametric Technology Corporation (Waltham, MA), (), Robert McNeel & Associates (Seattle), SolidWorks (Concord, MA) and Visio. "The OpenDWG Alliance is committed to publicly sharing the knowledge its members possess about the DWG format in order to provide millions of CAD users with better technology and better access to their own data," said Ted Johnson, executive VP of Visio and interim president of the OpenDWG Alliance. Suzie Young, president of Rockford Map Publishers, an Illinois-based vendor of land-ownership maps, says that the alliance is allowing her company to update and enhance its CAD information. "It will help us leverage the valuable intellectual property we've created and permit us to distribute it in whatever format we choose," she said. This alliance represents "a formidablecompilation of software engineering and CAD knowledge," said Parametric Technology product line manager Asa Trainer. "It will take the mystery and fear out of DWG and open up a vast amount of legacy drawing information that can be leveraged in future product development."