Abstract: A new approach to simplify complex model for facilitating its data exchange and transmission in a network-based collaborative design environment is presented.Non-geometric data are first removed from the product model.Control points of complicated B-spline curve and surface are reduced.Finally,the entire model data are compressed by the commonly used LZ coding.The proposed approach was implemented in the self-developed collaborative interactive system InteView 2.0 and experimental results show that this approach has much higher compression ratio compared with VRML under the same precision.