The “view concept”

A knowledge representation requires a multi-axial and contextualized navigation tool, and 3D is a technical solution particularly suited to these requirements.

Given the intelligent structuring of the body of knowledge (management of the representation / meaning relationship and the relationship between the terms / Ontology), the computer machine is able to offer a dynamic and interactive representation.

The interactive representation of information in xD offers a dynamic and realistic representation models. Those are entirely and easily to handle by the user (zoom, rotation, moving) and can be animated in order to explain their operation, their constitution, translate their natural behavior, or to show their options through a graphic treatment of colors, forms, accessories, icons…

The main interest of adopting these tools is the possibility of creating genuine virtual prototypes on which the user will be able to detect, much more quickly than in a shovelful of fields, errors of indexing or interpretation. The fact of having a xD model will allow, by moving elements, to detect the interferences between various covered subjects in different ways. In the same way, the routing is much more intuitive, and makes it possible to validate possibilities of treatment of a subject and thus of the editing of a content.

The creation of an xD Master model also guarantees the quality of updated information. Thus, the user is not likely any more to work on obsolete 2D data’s, because partially modified (the 2D plans constitute a “formalisation” which, to be understood, requires to have cultural background, with restricted interpretation to a specialist). The xD representation, much more realistic, facilitates the delivery of information towards “non-specialists” within the company (various newsrooms, service Web, administration,…), or outside (Internet,…), but also for workflow engines in the case of applications using semantic technologies (RDF, OWL, Linked Open Data).

So, it will be possible to treat great volumes of information in a multi-dimensional sight to give a total and instantaneous outline of structured information. For example, in the field of information, great volumes can be, a hyperbolic tree of files, a web site with linked data’s, the number of “hits” of the Web pages, or maintenance applications like the network traffic split by bits or sectors, the architecture network management, …

The last shelf to be negotiated is the volume of information generated because the xD representation generates much more data than 2D and one is likely to lose oneself there. For each type of data, it will be necessary, initially, to find or develop a mechanism of collection, possibly structure the collected data’s for a more powerful use, choose a graphic metaphor appropriate to this kind of information, define a mechanism of staggering and framing so that the final representation is displayable in its totality, generate the xD elements in scenes (virtual world), and provide a temporal refreshment of this scene,… 

There already existing tools for the SME market as SolidWorks, Autodesk with Inventor, UGS with Solid Edge or Missler Software with TopSolid.

Lastly, there exists a normative framework: 

  • ISO/IEC 19775-2: 2010: Information technologies -- Computer graphics and image processing extensible 3D (X3D) - Part 2: Interface access to the scenes (SAI) 
  • ISO/IEC 18026:2009 Technologies information - space Model of reference (SRM) 
  • ISO/IEC 19776-1: 2009 information Technologies - representation and Computer graphics and image processing of the environmental data - extensible Codings 3D (X3D) -- Part 1: Coding of the extensible language of beaconing (XML).