The growth of the Internet has ensured connectivity throughout the PLM value chain, i.e., right information may be available at the right time. Yet, conservative estimates in a study for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) suggest that imperfect interoperability costs at least 1 billion dollars per year to the United States Automotive Supply Chain. The inability to use translated product information is mainly because its semantics is lost during the translation to a new domain. Similar impact of the lack of interoperability is documented for the Aerospace and Shipbuilding industries in a follow-up study.

This becomes even more important in the context of increasing and changing capabilities (evolving semantics) of existing systems in distributed and global product development. The question now is not whether enterprises will continue to globalize and expand, but how to manage the process to the best advantage of the huge number of industries that have several billions of dollars at stake.

In our research, we focus on issues in capturing the product data semantics and enabling semantic integration of disparate information resources throughout the product lifecycle.