The Air Transport Association's Graphics Working Group has spent several years developing CGM profiles for graphical and intelligent graphics interchange. WebCGM is a CGM profile developed by the CGM Open consortium and approved by the W3C for use in the web environment. The WebCGM profile was derived from the ATA CGM profile for graphics interchange and is designed specifically for web applications. WebCGM is a full application profile of CGM, complete with semantics for all of the CGM application structure types and attributes. The ATA interchange profiles has only recently defined semantics for their models.

There have been applications developed for WebCGM and the interoperability of WebCGM files has been demonstrated. There have been some implementations of the ATA intelligent graphics exchange profile, but because of the lack of semantics these implementations have not proved to be completely interoperable. The ATA Graphics Working Group is attempting to use the experience of the WebCGM applications to improve the interoperability of the ATA intelligent graphics model.

This paper will review the intelligent graphics models in WebCGM, the ATA graphics interchange profile (GREXCHANGE), and the ATA intelligent graphics interchange profile (IGEXCHANGE). The authors will describe an architecture showing how the ATA intelligent graphics interchange requirements can be supported by the model in WebCGM using XML to encode the additional intelligent metadata required in the ATA models. An implementation of this architecture will be described and mechanisms for implementation will be shown.