Development of step-based collaborative design CAD system through web

In a manufacturing industry, it is important to exchange and share product data in its whole life cycle. Especially, technologies to share and integrate the product data generated by distributed departments through computer network are the core to construct CIM as well as GALS environment. To implement this technology, STEP and WWW based on the Internet are generally understood to be the principal tools. In this paper, we Provide a method to exchange product data between heterogeneous systems and suggest how to integrate it with the Internet. Then we develop a prototype system which enables users to design a same product model collaboratively and to share the modeling data through WWW.