a b s t r a c t
This paper proposes an approach for facilitating systems interoperability in a manufacturing environment.
It is based on the postulate that an ontological model of a product may be considered as a facilitator
for interoperating all application software that share information during the physical product lifecycle.
The number of applications involved in manufacturing enterprises may in fact refer to the knowledge
that must be embedded in it, appropriately storing all its technical data based on a common model. Standardisation
initiatives (ISO and IEC) try to answer the problem of managing heterogeneous information
scattered within organizations, by formalising the knowledge related to product technical data. The matter
of this approach is to formalise all those technical data and concepts contributing to the definition of a
Product Ontology, embedded into the product itself and making it interoperable with applications, thus
minimising loss of semantics