Flexible WYSIWIS for collaborate CAD

WYSIWIS (What You See Is What I See) is the prerequisite of collaborative CAD meeting, which, in its turn, has attracted increasing attention of CAD/CAM engineers. We aim to present our research results on a flexible WYSIWIS. The flexibility we provide is, we believe, quite convenient for participants of collaborative CAD meeting in the following two respects: (1) the participant who provides views (sponsor) can select at what time he wants the view to be seen by selected or all participants (receivers); (2) the receiver can select at what time he wants to see the views of a certain sponsor. The topics discussed in this paper are: analysis of view synchronization, the classification of participants, the definition of view synchronization token (VST), the four operations that synchronize view, the operation rules concerning VST, and a comparison of corresponding concepts between real-world meeting and the collaborative CAD meeting provided by the flexible WYSIWIS we developed.