WebCGM is a profile for the effective application of CGM in Web electronic documents. WebCGM 1.0 was a joint effort of the CGM Open Consortium Inc, in collaboration with W3C staff and supported by the European Commission Esprit project. WebCGM represents an important interoperability agreement amongst major users and implementors of CGM, and thereby unifies current diverse approaches to CGM utilization in Web document applications. WebCGM's clear and unambiguous conformance requirements enhance interoperability of implementations, and it has been possible to leverage existing CGM validation tools, test suites, and the product certification testing services for application to WebCGM .
The WebCGM Profile [1] specification was issued as a W3C Recommendation on 21st January, 1999. There was a second release on Dec 17, 2001 that incorporated changes dictated by errata.
Within short time, WebCGM has become the reference profile in the CGM world, and more and more other profiles start referencing WebCGM instead of developing their own profiles.
Most users of the Internet will rarely run into a CGM on a web page, however, WebCGM is used heavily in technical publishing projects around the world. It is both used as an archival format and for distribution purposes using Internet technologies. The deployment mostly happens on CD/DVD, or on private web sites, since most companies do not want to allow for casual access to their technical data.
Based on the experiences of both vendors and users of WebCGM during the past few years, a list of requirements has been compiled that justify a version 2.0 of this popular profile. Initial work has been started by the CGM Open, a member section of OASIS.
CGM Open recognizes the following requirements for a version 2.0 of the existing WebCGM 1.0 profile.
Some of the requirements for WebCGM 1.0 were spelled out in "W3C Scalable Graphics Requirements"