6. Contributions of international standards

6.1 Origin and genesis

We've seen the importance of product representation as a means of communication between those involved in the design process. Traditionally, the drawing was such a language, as the paper medium is universal. As long as digital CAD tools were limited to the subsequent local production of plans on paper, the process was not profoundly altered.

As soon as transfers between players were based on files, problems began to arise with the multitude of formats and image encodings defined by software publishers, not only for technical reasons to meet needs, but also to capture and retain customers.

Difficulties arose with conversions between CAD tools, between different systems, but also between successive versions of the...