hi there,

terrible interesting topic in general,..representing and managing data and structures. One might have a look at some of edward tuftes books an essays on this topic.

May be it would be a helpful thing, if people could describe the way they would use such a layer/tag-structure in their everyday work with MOI.

I would feel comfortable, if this system could imitate the rather traditional MATERIAL-ASSIGN-behaviour..so i would assign for instance aluminium to some unrelated parts..and to communicate certain functional details of a construction/object, i would use it mainly for/as ASSEMBLING GROUP..one problem might be, that there would be a need for an additional export-feature(dialog)..*export according to MATERIALS* or *export according to ASSEMBLY*, so that other 3d-applications could use the actual output, especially the rendering applications (hypershot, maxwell, fryrender..).

The visual representation might be a totally different matter. Maybe shifting from lets say DESIGNVIEW to ASSEMBLY-/TAGVIEW would be a solution..or just an on/off-switch-behaviour in the visual-appearance like thicker and coloured outlines(according to some scheme) of the TAG-ged objects..

I'm sure michael will make the right decision(s)..

best wishes,
marco

ps: maybe there is a way to incorporate some kind of a DESIGNREVIEW-feature with a reduced tool kit of pointers and speech bubbles for revision and presentation.