CADD Engineering Standards - Ohio Department of Transportation

January 18, 2013
Data from each discipline shall be maintained as individual sub-directories under the project directory.
The discipline sub-directories will be defined for the division of work by ownership, not necessarily the
type of work. As files are developed by the various disciplines, those files should generally be placed into
the project sub-directories corresponding to the creator of the work. Roadway design would typically
place their files under the roadway sub-directory, Surveyors under the survey sub-directory, and so forth.
If a discipline requires information from another discipline or shares files with multiple disciplines, the
needed files should be referenced from the original directory and not copied (see section 303
References). Disciplines may overlap work with some components of a design.
For example, if a roadway designer develops the drainage sheets, the files produced would, by the above
convention, go in the roadway sub-directory, rather than the drainage sub-directory, as the “roadway”
designer is the owner of the work. However, if so desired, the files could be put in the drainage subdirectory
by use of the Major project directory structure option. In making the determination of which
discipline’s sub-directory the file should be placed in, the designer must use common sense.
In some cases, it will be advantageous to create non-standard directories for additional separation of
work. This is common when multiple parties work on a single discipline design and the data must be
managed and merged. These additional directories can be created under the discipline specific
subdirectories to accommodate such circumstances. Do not create subdirectories at the same level as
the standard discipline subdirectories.
The following Table is provided to assist designers in managing Survey Basemap information within the
Project Directory for all Projects.
All Projects:
File Type (Per Fig. 304 -1) Directory
Existing Ground Survey – BE Per Figure 302-1; Projects (Survey Sub Directory)
Alphanumeric characters and underscores “_” are the only characters to be used in directory names.
ODOT provides a custom program, ODOT_Directory.exe that can be used to create the project
directories. This program is available on the ODOT CADD Standards Website.
56 ODOT CADD Engineering Standards