Collaborative Design

Various activities in collaborative design are currently being pursued by the graphics group at the TU Ilmenau. In the following, we sketch two projects: «Web Features» and «Konni».

Konni - An Internet Portal for Custom Design of Solariums and Glass-enclosed Porches

A client-server architecture has been developed for this application. The Model Server contains a scaled-down version of our conceptual modeling system COSMOS. A standard internet browser with a Java interface is used on the client side (e. g. to chose from customized standard models, for entering the dimensions and other parameters, and for interacting directly with a 3D model). A realistic rendering of the design can be generated by superimposing a shaded graphic of the 3D model with a scanned-in photo of the customer's house. This project is conducted in conjunction with the Steinbeis Transferzentrum für Interaktive Computergrafik/CAD and Widis GmbH in Berlin.

Web Features

The goal of this research is an interdisciplinary problem-solving approach for:

	collaboration between human scientists/designers (using networked computers)
	human-computer interaction, and
	collaboration between computers (distributed computing)

A realization of our vision is based on the feature concept of COSMOS. In particular, so-called programmable features describe the most important semantics of the design of products, parts, and individual features. Features may contain geometric and non-geometric information. An XML interface to the feature approach is currently being developed. RDF (Resource Description Framework) is considered as the base technology for the semantic interface. RDF is a standard to describe the semantics of web pages. It is not only readable to humans, but also to machines.