Exploitable results VEGA PLATFORM The VEGA project has established an information infrastructure which supports the technical and business operations of virtual or extended enterprises. The project has developed the VEGA Platform, which supports the remote access to STEP information held in more than one database and located in different geographical locations. At present, the construction industry generally builds one-of-a-kind products. The construction team that is formed to design and construct such a product is usually formed from many companies who work collaboratively for just the duration of the project. The information that the construction team uses is defined using a lot of virtual products that are in fact only drawings, specifications and other paper documents. For a single physical product, for example a building, we have sometimes hundreds of virtual products (drawings, etc) produced by various players like an architect, structural engineer and contractors etc. The project team has to hope that these virtual products are consistent with the physical product that is being built, but the statistical probability of that is of course rather small. The idea behind VEGA is to improve this situation by abandoning the idea of producing multiple virtual products but making just one consistent virtual product. To achieve this we need to address several issues: 1. organize the collaborative work around a project differently by binding all players in a single group we call a Virtual Enterprise; 2. organize the communication within this Virtual Enterprise; 3. the use of open definitions for the actual information that is held within a database; and also 4. using the same open definitions for the structure of the information, when technically accessing the data; 5. make the integration of workflows for all the participants involved possible. VEGA addresses the issues above and provides the technical solutions that are necessary to work in a virtual enterprise using groupware tools and distributed architectures when using an open IT platform. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
