CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

29 July 2009

Product News

True Engineering Technology Re-Invents The Number

Numbers play a critical role in every organization, from product design and development to manufacturing, science, education and finance. Yet numbers remain plain, unformatted text that most organizations struggle to find, format, manage and verify across desktop applications including email, Excel and PowerPoint.

"It's almost unbelievable that -- in an era where most information is intrinsically connected via the Web -- we haven't yet developed a better way of managing numbers, one of the most important types of information," noted Allen Razdow, founder of True Engineering Technology. Razdow, the inventor of Mathcad, the most widely-used engineering software and a co-founder of Mathsoft, founded True Engineering Technology to address the challenges created by unstructured numbers for knowledge workers.

Razdow and his team have developed a new semantic technology that elevates numbers from their static existence into a rich, meaningful data type that can be embedded in documents and workflows, resulting in a Web-friendly approach to numbers that makes it easy to quickly create, format, classify, store and discover numbers, in any kind of document. The company today unveiled a set of tools that make it easy to represent numbers as machine-readable, URL-like data called truenumbers™. Like URLs, truenumbers are live and connected throughout any desktop application in which they reside, and add value to numerical content by providing units, tolerance information, the properties or attributes they measure, source information and more.

"URLs and RSS have shown how much impact adding a bit of semantics to common data types can have. Doing the same for something as critical as numbers can have a transformative effect on desktop computing," added Razdow.

Ricardo Garcia is an Aircraft Structural Analyst for Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), a US Navy Command providing engineering, development, testing, evaluation, in-service support, and program management capabilities to deliver airborne weapons systems. An early adopter of truenumber technology, Garcia noted: "When you are keeping a fleet of sophisticated military airplanes flying to support US combat troops, confusion over a simple calculation that goes unchecked can have catastrophic results. With truenumbers, we will be able to manage and share critical data including design parameters and materials properties, ensuring that anyone on the team can easily get the most up-to-date information available at any time, from anywhere."

Product Lifecycle Management systems (PLM) are invaluable for structuring big engineering projects, but until truenumbers, nothing has been able to reach into the ordinary documents and emails engineers communicate with day to day to get a handle on the critical data and design intent locked inside. As soon as engineers start using truenumbers, traceability, re-use and compliance in their organizations increase, and ROI on document management, PLM and other IT goes up accordingly.

Bruce Jenkins, founder and CEO of Ora Research and one of the engineering industry's foremost market analysts noted: "True Engineering Technology recognizes that the real value in numbers is the numbers themselves and their pedigree, and not the document or application they are stored in -- it's the first solution I've seen that effectively unlocks the content from the container. Truenumbers essentially combines numerical representation and data management, providing significant value to numbers-driven organizations that struggle with knowledge capture, re-use, error reduction, traceability and productivity."

Product Details and Availability

True Engineering Technology's solution includes client-side applications for creating and working with truenumbers in desktop applications as well as a server-based numberspace™ repository. Anyone can create truenumbers for use in HTML-enabled applications such as email, PowerPoint, Word and Excel using the free Create a Number application at http://www.truenum.com. Registered users can access and store truenumbers in the free, public numberspace repository. Organizations that require privacy, system integration and enterprise features, can purchase an enterprise appliance directly from the company.

True Engineering Technology, LLC

Founded by Mathcad inventor and Mathsoft co-founder Allen Razdow, True Engineering Technology enables an open, standard approach for representation engineering knowledge, as well as solutions and professional services specifically designed to improve engineering productivity, accuracy and auditability. True Engineering Technology is revolutionizing the millions of engineering numbers that are otherwise locked in desktop applications (Word, Excel, PDF, email, etc.) and engineering software.

For more information see http://www.truenum.com.

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