Hey there everyone! Long time to talky talky..
So things took a detour as the oil and gas engineering thing went into decline in Calgary and I started looking at the industry as a whole for a while, then played in politics for the election last year while I've been thinking about how to leverage natural language processing to better organize our group efforts in team projects.
That said, I've read at least fifty papers by now and there's a surprising number of open source tools that are available for us to leverage. We can start by simply feeding complete drawing and documentation packages into a system and have it recognize the features, ESPECIALLY on client specific drawing specifications, or even better have access to a database that drove a drawing and document package.
At the very least I had derived a simple 3 input database for electrical cabling/interconnection design for oil and gas facilities that inferred all the wiring from the process design, the purchasing info, and the object location in the 3d model that could be used for starters. I had walked from this project partially because I didn't have the tools to adequately be able to quickly derive client standards with my current time resources.
I want to put the call out to the community here because ultimately my experience in just the northwestern North American oil and gas industry was just a few years and if it's worth developing a system like this it would be worth targeting as many industries as possible. My interests during university were deeper into hardware than software, lots of high frequency analog electronics, integrated circuit design, power electronics courses in the choosy years at the end. With this came a lot of maths with the imaginary numbers opening little portals into easy ways to describe complex numbers after we got through the mind rape of learning residue theorem.
All that aside, I'm driven by the fact that our engineering industries are slowly being outsourced because after paying the high cost of software and people there seems to be not enough money left for investors, as the trend I've noticed is an increase in outsourcing and a cronic abusive relationship between many firms and their customers creating a bad name for the industry overall. The cost associated with switching firms and reforging a strong relationship is high for many of our clients, as even they are struggling to maintain consistency across all of their design methodologies. None of these are significant problems if we throw some of the more recent advances in neural networking. I think that we could even design a network that can create the dwg files without any other intermediary and recreate the industry essentially overnight. Personally here, I think if I was to work in this direction that I am easily poised to at least create an autocad based app that would wrap up the system I had been developing a couple years back, but before I get started I wanted to see if really seriously looking at this goes with anybody.
Cheers!