About the ODA

The Open Design Alliance, formerly OpenDWG® Alliance, was formed in February 1998 to promote OpenDWG as an open standard for the exchange of CAD drawing data. Two major forces contributed to the creation of the ODA:

• The rise of the Internet and the ease of transmitting all types of data, including CAD data, made interoperability even more important than before. Anyone from a one-person shop to a large corporation could use the Internet or corporate Intranets to transmit, view, print, and plot drawing files, or to query those files for information.
• The number of DWG files containing valuable CAD data was continuing to grow, yet the valuable data stored in DWG files was kept in a format that was not accessible to end-users nor to programs that might extract data from the files, display them, or perform other useful functions.

In early 1998, Visio Corporation (now part of Microsoft® Corporation) acquired MarComp as part of an overall plan to help make the DWG file format an open standard. Visio Corporation then joined with the other ODA Founding Members to create OpenDWG Alliance, and donated the source code and programming libraries produced by MarComp to the OpenDWG Alliance for its non-exclusive use in promoting the DWG file format as an open standard. In May 2003, the OpenDWG Alliance signed an agreement with Bentley Systems to support their OpenDGN standard. In October 2003, the OpenDWG Alliance changed its name to Open Design Alliance, in recognition of its expanded mission.