Abstract
Even though we have greater chances to accomplish successful collaborative design by utilizing recent proliferation of networks, current practices do not fully take advantage of the information infrastructure. There are so much data over the networks, but not enough knowledge about the data is available to users. The main objectives of the product data interface system proposed in this paper are to capture more knowledge on managing product data and to provide users effective search capability. We define the metadata model for product data defined in STEP AP 203 and manage the metadata from product data in a repository system. Because we utilize the standard formats such as STEP for product data and RDF for metadata, the proposed approach can be applied to various fields of industries independently on commercial products.