It is managed by the nonprofit technology consortium, the Khronos Group, and has been adopted by ISO as a publicly available specification, ISO/PAS 17506.

Early collaborators included Alias Systems Corporation, Criterion Software, Autodesk, Inc., and Avid Technology.

[7] COLLADA was originally intended as an intermediate format for transporting data from one digital content creation (DCC) tool to another application.

The goal is to allow content creators to define various physical attributes in visual scenes.

PAL also provides support for COLLADA to physics engines that also feature a native interface.