WebCGM – Technical illustrations online

The Computer Graphics Metafile is an open international standard that is being used for 2D vector and raster graphics, as well as text, being defined by the ISO/IEC 8632 Standard. In contrast to other image formats, the CGM format is simply a text file that contains the information about the picture, in such a way being totally platform-independent.

The first implementation of CGM was simply created as a streamed representation of a sequence of Graphical Kernel System primitive operations, but it was subsequently improved.

The Air Transport Association in 1989 chose the CGM format as the main format to be used for 2-dimensional vector based technical illustrations used in the maintenance documentation. After that, the biggest companies of the world, among which were The Boeing Company and United Airlines, and after that the majority of the industry adopted CGM for the transfer if 2-dimensional vector data between different systems. In order to choose the best available vector image format, a review of all the proprietary and open vector imaging formats was done, considering the requirements for creation, interchange, delivery and use. The decision of ATA, plus its requirements for intelligent graphics the expansion of the CGM-supporting application infrastructure was very important for implementing CGM in aviation.Once with the heavy development of WWW in the last years, the delivery of technical documentation is more and more using the Internet. As a response to the development of Internet, W3C in collaboration with CGM Open Consortium developed a new standard, called WebCGM, created as an application profile for the CGM standard, based on the GREXCHANGE profile used by ATA. It is very similar with the CGM format, but was created to be used specifically on the Internet. On the other hand, specifically for the Internet, the Scalable Vector Format was developed by W3C, being designed specially for the web environment.