At the present time, there is no seamless way to transfer paper blueprints into electronic form. Existing automatic transfer methods often "miss" important sections of the drawings. Most transfers to electronic form now occur by manually tracing paper blueprints into electronic form. This is expensive and unreliable. As a result, examination and assessment of existing structures is limited, especially in time of crisis or after a failure has occurred. These paper forms contrast sharply with today's design practice of using electronic CAD systems for design and analysis. Electronic CAD systems allow an engineer to make an order of magnitude improvement in finite element analysis, structural analysis, and simulations of environmental conditions. This research is developing integrated frameworks and libraries to seamlessly convert legacy paper blueprints into a knowledge-based form of electronic objects. These objects will hold the syntax and semantics contained in the blueprints. The goal is a seamless transfer from paper blueprints to persistent electronic form that can be implemented by a practicing engineer who is not a computer expert.The potential commercial application as described by the awardee: The framework and libraries developed in this research will permit improved storage methods and analysis of existing engineered products and structures.
