Interoperability between CAD products

A long standing problem in the CAD industry is the interoperability issue between CAD products. Usually users cannot do everything in just one product. They start the conceptual design in one product (say, in AliasStudio), take the data to a solid modeler like Autodesk Inventor, finish up the engineering design, take it to CATIA for more design and some simulation analysis, etc.

When data gets translated between systems, they lose their integrity with every data translation. Many products support industry standard neutral formats such as IGES or STEP, CAD vendors also support direct translators.

For example, PRO-Engineer can read CATIA files directly. However, the native file formats are not open...meaning, the file format is not published. In order to read CATIA files, pro-e has to reverse engineer CATIA's file format.

Autodesk's most popular format is DWG and it is not open. It is one of the most reverse engineered formats. http://www.opendwg.com is a forum just to reverse engineer dwg file format.