Understanding 6W Tags on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is an all-in-one cloud-based CAD, storage, and collaboration platform. You can design online with browser-based CAD tools like, xShape and xDesign or connect the platform to SOLIDWORKS to enhance your workflow with the suite of tools available through the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

When working on any engineering or design project, a lot of different types of information and metadata are inevitably created for your 3D models, drawings, BOMS, and invoices. This data & documentation is created at every step of the process to move a project to completion. The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform is here to help you sort and wade through these mountains of data generated intuitively and powerfully.

What are 6W Tags?

6W Tags are useful to organize the content of any and all kinds of data uploaded to a 3DSpace or 3DDrive.

Even non-design data, such as simulation results or Office documents that are stored on the platform can make use of the powerful 6W Tags.

Below is an explanation of the type of information the 6W Tags help with aggregating:

• What – Filter for the type of content (CAD, office documents, simulation data, tasks, etc).
• Who – Filter for the person who uploaded, edited, commented, revised, and owns the data.
• When – Filter for a specific date range.
• Where – Filter for a geolocation or a source.
• How – Filter for if a part is made or purchased with the manufacturing process.
• Why – Filter for task and project management.

6W Tags can work well out of the box and answer who owns the file, where it lives, and when was it saved. These are all standard bits of metadata that the system will populate for you automatically. However, users and companies may find adding their own 6W Tags built on in-house vocabulary can be beneficial. For example, companies have added things like project number, material, and vendor tags, so these property buckets are populated in SOLIDWORKS and they become usable tags on 3DEXPERIENCE.

How To Use 6W Tags

Normal searching through 3DEXPERIENCE can produce hundreds of results if you’re looking for something with a generic name like “bolt”. However, using 6W Tags allows you to filter and narrow down your search results by many characteristics under each of the 6W tags.

Tag icon next to the 3DEXPERIENCE search bar

To use the 6W Tags, click on the tag icon next to the search bar at the top of your screen. Then you can begin filtering down the results based on your request criteria. In the What tag you might decide to only show parts and assemblies by using the “physical product” filter. Additionally, you may specify “Stainless Steel” as the material you are searching for. Stacking filters in this way can rapidly narrow down the results from your database on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and provide you with just the results that you’re looking for.

Examples of 6W Tags in Use

In an example, we had an initial search for data yielding over 1000 results using a very generic query. However, by filtering for only files tagged with “Physical Product” and only files with “Plain Carbon Steel” we narrowed our result down to 17 results. This helps us to find the final part we are looking for much more quickly than with traditional search.

Additionally, the 6W Tags can be used in the context of the apps running on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. In the example below, the materials tags have been used to color code which parts are made of specific materials in the graphics area.

Filtering visual content based on 6W Tags

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