How Roschiwal + Partner Made a Large Document Archive Accessible, Drawings Included.

An archive that has grown beyond anyone's overview

Roschiwal + Partner has worked as an engineering firm on a large number of projects for years. What comes out of that stays: calculations, specifications, reports, correspondence, drawings, project files. The archive has grown very large over time.

Large volumes of data are not a problem by themselves. They become one the moment nobody has a full overview of what actually exists anymore. At that point, even full-text search stops helping, because it assumes you already know the right term. That is exactly what you do not know when you have a question about an unfamiliar or old project.

From searching to asking

KoAssist draws on the existing archive and answers questions from it, instead of returning a list of hits. The difference is practical: you phrase the question the way you would ask a colleague, and get an answer with a reference to the file and the page.

That reference is not decoration. In an engineering firm, a statement without a source is not usable, because it cannot be checked. Only the evidence turns a plausible-sounding answer into one you can actually work with.

Why drawings are the harder part

In technical documents, a significant part of the information is not in running text. It sits in dimensions, in sectional views, in symbols, in title blocks, in the spatial layout of the sheet. A system that only pulls text out of a file sees almost nothing of a drawing.

That is why drawing integration is not a side issue. It is the point that decides whether document search really holds up in engineering.

First steps into CAD and drawings

First steps have been taken together with Roschiwal + Partner here. This is ongoing work, not a finished feature, and it is deliberately described that way: drawings are a hard field, and presenting a work in progress as finished would not help anyone.

The foundation is in place, because KoAssist works multimodally and evaluates image content instead of skipping over it. What becomes of that foundation in practice takes shape through the collaboration.

Related topics

Why images matter as much as text in engineering is covered in the article on multimodal AI in engineering. For an overview of the use cases, see the page AI in Engineering Design; for details on hosting and data protection, see the page Security.

The same reading of image content carries the drawing check.

How the drawing check and similar part search run as checks within a project is shown by the project memory.