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I. AbstractAnnotator is a prototype to investigate the application of AI techniques to the annotation of engineering drawings. In particular, Annotator addresses drawings of piping systems such as those for chemical plants or waste treatment facilities. The isometric representation of the piping system is selected because it is the most numerous type of drawing in plant design. Knowledge contained in hierarchies represents the CAD model of the piping system, features of the model and features of the drawing. Production rules about relationships among model items and features make annotation decisions, creating instances in a hierarchy of drawing annotations. Issues in geometry such as parallelism and perpendicularity and the translation of the 3-D model world into the 2-D drawing representation are addressed. Algorithms determine geometric intersections; rules specify whether intersections between given object classes are considered acceptable. Although Annotator prototype is separate from the CAD/CAM environment, the Annotator prototype illustrates the potential for fully automating the annotation process through representation of the knowledge about a piping model and its dimensioning requirements within a rulebased, object-oriented hierarchy.

The need to manage large information repositories in a secure, distributed environment increases with the growth of the Internet. To address this need, a system capable of managing the contents of an LDAP directory over the Web has been designed and developed. This system allows for the directory's data to be divided into communities and supports the delegation of administrative authority over those communities to a distributed set of administrators. The communities may be subdivided recursively into subgroups, and rights over those subgroups also may be restricted. Thus, system administrators can dynamically delegate subsets of their permissions over a subset of their managed data, allowing for the flexible and effective control of permissions over the data within distributed organizations. The system solves the delegated administration problem for managing the contents of an LDAP directory in a distributed environment. Today, it supports the administration of over 20 production directories by well over 2000 distributed administrators.

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