Unlock The Value of Your CAD Model Data

Extracting, enhancing, and viewing CAD model data without the need for the original authoring application is now a reality! CADnection is a plug-and-play utility that delivers app-ready data, insights, and viewables derived from your CAD models. As a data-source solution, CADnection can significantly improve the scope and value of your existing search and discovery applications, enterprise data management solutions, and even your custom apps.

CADnection treats over 95% of all CAD applications in use today including AutoCAD, Catia, Creo, Inventor, Solidworks, NX, Revit, and more. Configurable settings allow you to identify the data you want to extract, including characteristics such as entity types and attributes, blocks, reference files, parts, assemblies, PMI, GD&T, boundary representations (B-Rep) and more.

Once data is extracted, CADnection provides significant flexibility to enhance and enrich your data. This flexibility includes customized attribute mappings, units of measure normalization, and establishing where-used and composed-of relationships. Once the data is enhanced, powerful enrichment capabilities can infuse additional insights from other data sources such as your ERP application.

What’s more, CADnection provides a full-featured, browser-based 2D and 3D viewing capability. Visual representations are automatically created, including a thumbnail and lightweight viewable format. Even large CAD models are quickly rendered and made available. Users can manipulate (e.g. rotate, parts explosion, etc.), markup, and capture images for use in other applications such as technical documentation.

A recent project with Lucidworks highlights how CADnection can be used in a next-generation enterprise search platform. CADnection and Lucidworks worked together to extend the value of the Lucidworks Fusion enterprise search and insights engine to include access to CAD model data. Central to this was Lucidworks’ App-Studio which was used as the user experience front-end. A short demo is available here.

CADnection’s “secret sauce” is its extraction and Smart Parsing capabilities. Think of CAD models as mini databases with rich collections of attribute characteristics or so-called tag/value combinations. Things like part number, title blocks, units of measure and so-on. CADnection harvests this data, enhances it, and packages it up to be seamlessly submitted to other applications such as Solr, Elasticsearch, or other search and data management applications such as your existing PLM or CMS tools. Or you might want to simply use it within Excel. CADnection is the ultimate app-ready data source to help you unlock the value in your CAD models.

Learn more about CADnection or start using CADnection today with our self-serve evaluation download. Contact us to learn more.