Seattle, Wa.— Fourteen companies, representing CAD vendors and users, announced Feb. 10 that they've formed the OpenDWG Alliance to share expertise on the DWG file format. The new association of vendors and users is promoting Autodesk's DWG drawing file format as an open industry standard for the exchange of computer aided design (CAD) drawings. To advance widespread access to DWG data, the alliance has also made publicly available the DWG software technology recently acquired by Visio from MarComp Inc.

The Open DWG Alliance's members include: Baystate Technologies Inc., DataCAD LLC, Diehl Graphsoft Inc., Eagle Point Software Inc., IMSI, Informative Graphics Corp., Inso Corp., Intergraph Corp., Ketiv Technologies, Nemetschek AG, Parametric Technology Corp., Robert McNeel & Associates, SolidWorks Corp., and Visio Corp.

The OpenDWG Toolkit, which includes C-language programming libraries that provide read and write access to DWG files, were made available for download Feb. 11 at www.opendwg.org.