Update by Ian Gibson
Sunday, 22 February 2009 16:11 

ASTM has recently established the F42 Additive Manufacturing working group to discuss and develop standards for layer-based additive manufacturing technologies. One of the first things that was discussed and agreed upon was that we should refer to these technologies as Additive Manufacturing (AM) rather than using other terms like Rapid Prototyping, Additive Fabrication, etc.

The German standards group has already started to use this term and other key research organisations (like NSF and ONR) are also adopting this term.