<p class="MsoNormal">To add to what Bryan already said, which I largely agree with,
there are some other things that you may want to consider. For instance, many items in the OSHW
Documentation Taxonomy have already been defined in ISO 10303 (a.k.a. Standard for
the Exchange of Product models a.k.a. STEP).
There are industry-led efforts going on that use ISO 10303 and related
standards for hardware documentation. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.rassc.org">www.rassc.org</a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.lotar-international.org">www.lotar-international.org</a></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">http://www.asd-ssg.org/asd-ils-suite-of-specifications</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">LOTAR is advancing STEP AP242, which contains mechanical CAD
geometry and associated product manufacturing information such as Geometric
Dimensioning and Tolerancing according to ASME 14.41. For non-shape information such as Product
Data Management (BOM) and archiving Meta-data, LOTAR is using AP239 Product
Life Cycle Support (PLCS). The AP242
schema is freely available from the CAX-IF, which develops recommended
practices for implementers and conducts test rounds for translators. There
is a legacy standard for Technical Data Packaging, AP232, but that is being
largely superseded by AP239 implementations.
The AIA/ASD Integrated Logistics Support (ILS) S-series specifications cover
related information for product support.
Most of the S-series specifications
that are in development are using PLCS.
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">OpenCascade is challenging, but the FreeCAD, OpenPLM, and
IfcOpenShell projects have been able to build usable open source tools based on
it. While I agree that BRL-CAD source
code is better managed, both could be useful for open source hardware
documentation development, as can commercial tools. </p><p class="MsoNormal">Charlie </p><br>On Thursday, March 7, 2013 1:48:33 PM UTC-7, Catarina Mota wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0;margin-left: 0.8ex;border-left: 1px #ccc solid;padding-left: 1ex;">Excellent! We're collecting links and info about all existing efforts regarding documentation and will bundle them together in a format accessible to everyone - probably a list with brief descriptions and links.<br><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 3:43 PM, Bryan Bishop <span dir="ltr"><<a href="javascript:" target="_blank" gdf-obfuscated-mailto="1nj0MbmqFS8J">kan...@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Catarina Mota<br>
<<a href="javascript:" target="_blank" gdf-obfuscated-mailto="1nj0MbmqFS8J">cata...@openmaterials.org</a>> wrote:<br>
> Great, link please?<br>
<br>
Here's one about the skdb format:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://gnusha.org/skdb/package_spec.html" target="_blank">http://gnusha.org/skdb/<wbr>package_spec.html</a><br>
<a href="http://gnusha.org/skdb/" target="_blank">http://gnusha.org/skdb/</a><br>
<br>
The biggest hold-ups for this were two-fold:<br>
<br>
1) not enough people have opted to review it, suggesting edge cases,<br>
proposing alternatives, etc. I think perhaps the best reviewer was<br>
Smári McCarthy, because he went off to instead build tangiblebit since<br>
he disliked python a great deal... and then he stopped working on<br>
that. This was one step ahead of "use dpkg for everything!" and it<br>
seemed to work, at least a little.<br>
<br>
2) CAD integration, which, in retrospect, is a big project to chew<br>
off. I ended up with piles of code for nurbs manipulation that doesn't<br>
work, and then lots of opencascade junk laying around. Thankfully, the<br>
brlcad crew has been working very hard with the STEP format lately<br>
through Step Code Library (an ISO 10303-2xx implementation) and also<br>
on their nurbs support. So that's nice progress..<br>
<br>
The advantage of this is that there is code available in git<br>
repositories. I wouldn't mind scrapping it, if there was a better<br>
alternative.<br>
<div><br>
>> Open source hardware packaging formats like tangiblebit, skdb, mcad (which<br>
>> had a slight packaging aspect, although that wasn't the original goal),<br>
>> thingdoc, thingscrap, thingzip, cern's repository format, that<br>
>> thing/javascript/repo mirror format, and a long list of others have a<br>
>> suspicious absence in any of these email threads and it is perplexing.<br>
>> Naturally, these formats aren't complete solutions and still need review and<br>
>> more contributors, but either propose an alternative (even a proof of<br>
>> concept) or submit patches... right? what's the hold up?<br>
><br>
> Can you share a document with us with a list and links to everything you<br>
> have (or know of) so we can bring those into the discussion?<br>
<br>
</div>Here are some links to some email threads all the way back to 2008<br>
discussing hardware packaging formats:<br>
<br>
<a href="http://heybryan.org/om.html" target="_blank">http://heybryan.org/om.html</a> which were collected from<br>
<a href="https://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing" target="_blank">https://groups.google.com/<wbr>group/openmanufacturing</a><br>
<br>
as for individual projects:<br>
<br>
tangiblebit - <a href="http://diyhpl.us/cgit/tangiblebit" target="_blank">http://diyhpl.us/cgit/<wbr>tangiblebit</a><br>
thingdoc - <a href="https://github.com/josefprusa/ThingDoc" target="_blank">https://github.com/josefprusa/<wbr>ThingDoc</a><br>
thingzip - <a href="http://spec.makerbot.com/" target="_blank">http://spec.makerbot.com/</a> (which seems to be down, I guess<br>
they aren't interested in maintaining it)<br>
skdb - <a href="http://gnusha.org/skdb" target="_blank">http://gnusha.org/skdb</a> and<br>
<a href="http://gnusha.org/skdb/package_spec.html" target="_blank">http://gnusha.org/skdb/<wbr>package_spec.html</a><br>
<a href="https://github.com/kanzure/skdb" target="_blank">https://github.com/kanzure/<wbr>skdb</a><br>
thingscrap output format - <a href="https://github.com/grevaillot/thingscrap" target="_blank">https://github.com/grevaillot/<wbr>thingscrap</a><br>
cern - <a href="http://www.ohwr.org/projects/bpm-dbe/repository" target="_blank">http://www.ohwr.org/projects/<wbr>bpm-dbe/repository</a> (oops, i was<br>
wrong, they have no specification document)<br>
<br>
I don't remember the other urls.<br>
<div><div><br>
- Bryan<br>
<a href="http://heybryan.org/" target="_blank">http://heybryan.org/</a><br>
<a value="+15122030507">1 512 203 0507</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>
</blockquote>