Discovery of relationships between engineering drawings and 3D CAD models for business intelligence gathering.

Presenter: Michal Ondrejcek, NCSA
Authors: Michal Ondrejcek, Jason Kastner, Rob Kooper, Kenton McHenry and Peter Bajcsy

2009 NCSA Private Sector (PSP) Annual Meeting, May 13-15, NCSA, Illinois (2009)

This poster presents a framework for relationship discovery from 2D engineering drawings and 3D CAD Models. The framework consists of modules for automated file system analysis, file content analysis, integration of the results from analyses, storage of metadata and data-driven decision support for discovering relationships among files.

The system level analysis is performed by using Aperture and leads to metadata about file name, MIME type, and location on disk. The file content analysis includes filtering for file type detection (e.g., file format identification using DROID and PRONOM) and type-specific content analysis (such as, information extraction from 2D engineering drawings using Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and keyword based extraction of information from 3D CAD models). The integration component consolidates metadata extracted from the file system and form the file content by establishing mappings between ontologies used in metadata RDF-based representations. All RDF-based representations of metadata are stored using Tupelo in an underlying content repository. The extracted metadata in a content repository are mined by computing statistics of common descriptors across file types, for instance, for the 2D engineering drawings and 3D CAD file types.

We report our preliminary design of the framework and the performance of prototype modules for a test collection of electronic records documenting the Torpedo Weapon Retriever (TWR 841). This test collection presents a problem of unknown relationships among files that currently include 784 2D image drawings and 22 CAD models.