Syntactic interpretation approaches for innovative engineering drawings conversion support system

By integrating human intelligence and enabling geometric modeling and knowl edge based systems technologies, a realistic and plausible solution for two critical activities in a legacy data conversion cycle of engineering drawi ngs (LDC): vector drawing editing and high level symbol interpretation was investigated. A prototype system called LEDCONS was implemented to illustra te the concepts and demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture and met hodologies proposed. In this paper, the concepts and methods used by LEDCON S to perform syntactic level drawing interpretations are presented. The LED CONS system modules at this level are designed based on the strategy that d rawing interpretation could be embedded within the process of human editing in an interactive fashion. Two fundamental approaches, the automatic searc h-and-match approach and the manual select-and-recognize approach, used for recognizing drawing constructs at this level are proposed. With syntactica lly related drawing constructs, such as text blocks, hatch patterns, dimens ion sets, FCF/datum constructs, and geometry entities are extracted. Hence, the reusability and reliability of the drawing data can be significantly in creased. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.