Your Excel and your Windows programs aren't meant to support each other, but computer scientists say that they should. Database and text programs should be searchable by one software application that could comb through both text and spreadsheets and return meaningful results, they say.

A team of European researchers is behind such a software system, which would analyze in tandem information stored in databases and written text.

"Analyzing structured data is not new," said Babis Theodoulidis, a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology in Manchester, England. "Analyzing unstructured information using computers is only a recent development, but integrating and analyzing the combined data has never been done before. Our framework makes that possible."

Theodoulidis coordinates the European Union-funded Parmenides project.

Parmenides coordinates structured information stored in databases with unstructured information, essentially anything that can't be stored in a database. The vast majority of digitized information is unstructured text, like reports, newspaper articles, letters, and memos.

So a computer running the Parmenides application could analyze a given text and put it into context.

"For example, a company might get a letter of complaint and then an employee needs to read and forward it to the right person," Theodoulidis said. "In our system, the letter is read by a computer, which then links the letter to the company's personnel database and forwards the letter to the right person."

"Analyzing text requires human intervention, and when you're trying to analyze perhaps thousands of documents in many different languages, really large-scale text analyses become very expensive, or even impossible," Theodoulidis said.

The Greek Ministry of Defense has already used the system to analyze large amounts of unstructured data—like newspaper reports about terrorist attacks—which it combined with military intelligence. Such analysis could reveal that one group is changing its methods from car bombs to suicide bombs or chemical attacks. Or that one group is beginning to work with another, Theodoulidis said.

Also, Unilever used Parmenides to get a picture of the relationship among weight, health, and food by analyzing journal articles and newspaper reports. The system can monitor changes over time to identify new trends.

The Space Shuttle may soon meet its replacement. The Crew Exploration Vehicle is NASA's proposed manned spacecraft—essentially, the next-generation Space Shuttle.

NASA engineering teams are working on the Crew Exploration Vehicle, which will be the first manned spacecraft designed in the United States in the past 30 years.

Engineers at work on the spacecraft use product lifecycle management software, Windchill, from PTC of Needham, Mass., as an extranet to manage data and to collaborate between themselves and their suppliers.

When Stefan Kolb, manager of research and design, joined a newly formed company, he had one stipulation: Product development must be based on three-dimensional computer-aided design.

The company makes huge pieces of mining equipment and Kolb thought 3-D was up for such big jobs.

"It was the year 2003; I certainly wasn't going to set up a two-di-mensional design process," Kolb said. "With 3-D, we can show customers exactly what we intended in discussions, we can run simulations, and we can detect problems early on."

He also selected 3-D for accurate quotation.

"You can fool yourself and your customers with 2-D drawings, but that can be very dangerous," said Bernhard Sänger, general manager. He works with Kolb at the company, Robbins GmbH of Goeppingin, Germany, which makes mining equipment like the tunnel-boring machines capable of digging deep into the earth.

Under Kolb's tutelage, the company installed the OneSpace Designer CAD software from CoCreate of Fort Collins, Colo.

In the future, company officials want to use CAD data to create virtual prototypes.

"Our customers pay us for a perfect product," Sänger said. "In fact, they don't pay entirely until they see our machines flawlessly bore a hole on the job site."

Without the CAD software, "We'd end up solving many of our problems with a welding torch. That's expensive and time-consuming," Kolb said.

Large models naturally make for complicated calculations. Take the case of Stork Fokker Aerospace.

The aerospace company in Hoogeveen, The Netherlands, created the fiberglass and aluminum laminate called Glare for the Airbus A380's J-Nose—the edge of the fixed wing.

Pushing envelopes: A supplier of composite materials for the 555-seat Airbus A380 found it needed special calculation software and a new server to deal with the model of the airplane's wing.

While the J-Nose was nothing new for Stork Fokker (It had made those pieces for the A380's forerunner, the A340.), the company's engineers had never dealt with a model as big as the A380. The model's sheer size made it difficult to work with, said Wydo Van de Waerdt, a stress engineer at the company.

"The A380 wing is so large that linear calculations no longer sufficed," Van de Waerdt said.

The calculations were the largest computational models the company had ever used.

"The size of the computation and the data processing involved meant we had to purchase a new computation server," Van de Waerdt said.

The computations also exceeded the capabilities of Excel, he added. So the company brought in new calculation software, Mathcad, from Mathsoft Inc. of Cambridge, Mass.

That software lets engineers adjust calculations for slight changes, which speeds along the design process, Van de Waerdt said.

Here's a little scenario: The turbulence grows worse; you tumble in your seat. You look out the plane's window at the dark storm clouds and fight nausea even as you hear someone else being sick.

This is your worst nightmare. You want to jump up, run to the cockpit, and beg the pilot to land.

But there is no pilot, or plane either. You're actually sitting in the virtual reality room at the Fairview University Anxiety Disorders Clinic in Minneapolis, experiencing the flight through a headset, through woofers that simulate engine vibrations in the floor under your seat, and by Chris Donahue, a University of Minnesota assistant professor of psychiatry, shaking the chair with his hand.

For nearly a year, the clinic has been using virtual reality to desensitize patients to their fears and anxieties. The key is to repeat an experience many times, which can't be easily done when the anxiety to be treated involves things like flying or public speaking. Other programs treat fear of storms, heights, closed spaces, and being interviewed.

Engineers use much the same type of virtual reality technology, but to a different end, of course. They immerse themselves in an analysis or simulation to better understand the problem and to see it close up.

People with anxiety disorders immerse themselves in an experience to eventually desensitize themselves to the feelings.

In the virtual-reality flight program, patients experience sitting in a plane on the tarmac, taxiing, taking off, flying, and hitting turbulence. Those who fear speaking in public stand in front of a bored or hostile virtual audience and hear a cell phone go off in the middle of their presentations.

"Immersion is everything for this to be a viable therapy," said Matt Kushner, the clinic director. "We match the sights and sounds of the real experience."

Afterward, patients tell the therapists what worked and what didn't. For example, fear-of-flying patients have said that the vibrations in the floor were important in making the experience realistic.

Without realism, patients are unlikely to feel afraid and therefore cannot become desensitized to their fear, Kushner said.

Making something as huge as a ship calls for a lot of internal business coordination.

Engineers at New Century Shipbuilding in China are at work on the prototype of a container ship. They are using software that coordinates communication among the hull, outfitting, design, and fabrication departments.

"In our heavily competitive market, it's vital to streamline every aspect of our business," said Chen Xueliang, director of New Century's design institute located in Jingiang.

The shipbuilder has installed a plant-design management system from Aveva of Cambridge, England. With the system, the company standardized all departments on the software platform, which includes visualization, project management, and engineering design capabilities.

Call it a very advanced Etch A Sketch.

Imaginestics of West Lafayette, Ind., has created 3D-Seek, a shape-search engine. With it, users can find items in an online catalog by making a doodle of the part they need. They don't have to specify an item name or part number; they just need a hand drawing.

Google not doing it for you? 3D-Seek is a shape-search engine. Sketch the part you seek on a digital pad and an engine that can recognize patterns will comb through a catalog to find it.

The engine connects to a freehand sketching device. Pattern-recognition technology does the rest by matching the sketch with parts in the catalog, said Nainesh Rathod, Imaginestics' president. Users select the part they need and order it.

The company developed 3D-Seek and its associated catalog mainly for manufacturing firms looking for hinges, bolts, conveyor belts, motors, and the like.

"This search engine can help find the proverbial needle in the haystack," said Errol Arkilic, an officer at the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research program, which helped fund research for the shape-search engine.

Think of 3D-Seek as an advanced Etch A Sketch.

"In order to make such a search engine commercially viable, we had to overcome the challenge of matching something as rudimentary as a doodle to a 3-D object in seconds," Rathod said. "This is important, as Web users have become accustomed to retrieving information instantaneously."

Eventually, the basic search engine could be useful for ordinary shoppers: Instead of having to go to the hardware store with, say, a specific plumbing joint, customers could just sketch what they need.

While researchers have been working for several years on software that can compare industry-standard 3-D image files to each other, the new method is faster than most and permits search terms that are outside the norm, Arkilic said.

CADDsoft Solutions Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas, has released Concepts Unlimited, the third version of its CAD software.

VizUp Technology of Vancouver, British Columbia, has released VizUp 2.1.2, which can reduce models
of as many as five million triangles.

Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., has purchased @Last Software of Boulder, Colo, which makes the 3-D modeler SketchUp.

Agile Software Corp. of San Jose, Calif., will add the Linux open source operating system to the list of supported environments for its Agile PLM software.

Fluent Inc. of Lebanon, N.H., has upgraded its FloWizard software to version 2.1. The software is for flow modeling and thermal analysis.

According to a recent estimate by market analysis firm Dara-
tech, spending on PLM software topped $10.4 billion in 2005, up 13 percent over 2004. Daratch is located in Cambridge, Mass.

MachineWorks Ltd. of Sheffield, England, which makes simulation and verification software for machine tool manufacturers, has released MachineWorks version 6.3.

Capvidia of Leuven, Belgium, has upgraded its FormatWorks software, which is for SolidWorks users who need to translate Catia data into their CAD program.

Autodesk Inc. of San Rafael, Calif., has released its Autodesk Manufacturing Supplier Content Center, an online portal that offers catalogs of models and parts through the Inventor desktop.

Fort Worth, Texas-based developer Pointwise has upgraded its computational fluid dynamics meshing software to Gridgen version 15.09, which now includes solid modeling and solid meshing.

Cimatron Ltd. of Givat Shmuel, Israel, which makes CAD and computer-aided manufacturing software, has released
5-Axis Production, a five-axis numerically controlled package for production of complex parts.

Magsoft Corp. of Ballston Spa, N.Y., is shipping Flux version 9.2 for the analysis and design of electromagnetic and electromechanical devices.

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