One of today’s hottest topics in information technology is integration. In this paper, we deal with the problem of data integration in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) vision. That is, how to integrate product data throughout the entire product lifecycle, ranging from conception, through design, to manufacture, operation and destruction. This paper presents three approaches studied in the context of mechanical products to show how the problem of integration is dealt with. The study is mainly based on some examples of activities (or phases) taken from the product development lifecycle. Including the entire set of activities is out of the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, the three proposed approaches; meta-data, features, and ontologies show enough flexibility and potential to be generalized quite easily to other phases.

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[17] World Wide Web Consortium, “XML and its Related Document Object Model: DOM,” http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-LEVE L-1. Sihem Mostefai is a lecturer in the Computing Science Department at University Mentouri of Constantine, Algeria. She received her MSc in computer graphics in 1993, in addition to an engineer Diploma in computer systems in 1989 from the same university. She is also preparing a PhD in product lifecycle management applied to the case of mechanical products. Her research interests are in CAD/CAM, feature-based modelling, and data exchange. Abdelaziz Bouras is a full professor at IUT Lumière Lyon II, and head of CERRAL Center, at PRISMa Laboratory, Claude Bernard University, Lyon, France. He was in 1998 at the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL) of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a guest researcher. He received his PhD in computer science from Claude Bernard University in 1992 and his engineer Diploma in mechanical engineering in 1987 from The National Institute of Mechanical Engineering (INGM) of Boumerdas, Algeria. His research interests are in solid and feature based modeling, collaborative design, and data exchange. Mohamed Batouche received his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine, France, in 1989 and 1993, respectively. Currently, he is a full professor at the University Mentouri of Constantine, Algeria. His research areas include artificial intelligence and pattern recognition.