NEWS RELEASE
December 01, 1999
Contact: Leo Schlosberg
HeavyWare.com™
(847) 639-2829

HeavyWare.com™ has been chosen to lead the Catalogs Working Group, one of six such groups that make up the larger aecXML Working Group. HeavyWare.com™'s Director of Technology, Ari Gordon-Schlosberg will be leading efforts to define an industry-wide standard for the exchange of catalog data in the A/E/C community.

"A whole new world of painless specifying and purchasing is about to sweep the industry. Soon it will be possible for architects to browse a catalog and select items to place in their designs without leaving their CAD applications. Not only that, but the information about the components they choose will seamlessly integrate themselves into their drawings. Using the power of the Internet and computers to find the perfect piece for their projects will represent a quantum leap in the design process. Contrasted with the current practice of spending hours poring over paper catalogs, it's like coming out of the Dark Ages of page flipping and extensive, fruitless searching," said Gordon-Schlosberg, "And architects are not the only ones who will reap the benefits. The information that catalog purveyors have about their products is useful in the estimation and specification phases of a project as well."

"What really excites me is integration of our work with the work being done in the Construction Management Working Group: the real killer app here is the combination of pervasive accessible data and wireless communications; it won't be uncommon for the people installing the building components to have the same product information right in front of them that the product vendors themselves have."

(an aecXML.org press release on the election of working group chairs is available at here).

More about aecXML
aecXML is designed to facilitate communications and e-commerce among the various organizations involved in A/E/C projects. These include architects, engineers, contractors, owner/operators, estimators, consultants, materials suppliers, building product manufacturers and others. aecXML uses the XML-standard revolution and the BizTalk Framework to remove the current barriers to exchanging A/E/C-specific information in electronic business-to-business conversations.

More about the aecXML Project
The aecXML Project, directed by noted architectural technology consultant Jerry Laiserin, is a collection of independent, interested parties whose purpose is to review and exchange ideas on aecXML's initial specification. Since its inception in August of 1999, the aecXML Project has gained interest from 450+ interested organizations on six continents.

For more information, visit www.aecxml.org.