ICAD (software)

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ICAD (Corporate history: ICAD, Inc., Concentra (name change at IPO in 1995), KTI (name change in 1998), Dassault Systemes (purchase in 2001) (^[1]) is a knowledge-based engineering (KBE) system that enables users to encode design knowledge using a semantic representation that can be evaluated for Parasolid output. ICAD has an open architecture that can utilize all the power and flexibility of the underlying language.

KBE, as implemented via ICAD, received a lot of attention due to the remarkable results that appeared to take little effort.^{[citation needed]} ICAD allowed one example of end-user computing that in a sense is unparalleled. Most ICAD developers were degreed engineers. Systems developed by ICAD users were non-trivial and consisted of highly complicated code. In the sense of end-user computing, ICAD was the first to allow the power of a domain tool to be in the hands of the user, at the same time being open to allow extensions as identified and defined by the domain expert or subject-matter expert (SME).^{[citation needed]}

A COE article^[2] looked at the resulting explosion of expectations (see AI winter), which were not sustainable. However, such a bubble burst does not diminish the existence of ability that would exist were expectations and use reasonable or properly managed.^{[citation needed]}