In manufacturing enterprises the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach has been considered as an essential solution for improving the product competitive ability. It aims at providing a shared platform that brings together different enterprise systems at each stage of a product life cycle in or across enterprises. Although the main software companies are making efforts to create tools for offering a complete and integrated set of systems, most of them have not implemented all of the systems. Finally, they do not provide a coherent integration of the entire information system. This results in a kind of "tower of Babel", where each application is considered as an island in the middle of the ocean of information, managed by many stakeholders in an enterprise, or even in a network of enterprises. The different peculiarities of those stakeholders are then over increasing the issue of interoperability. The objective of this thesis is to deal with the issue of semantic interoperability, by proposing a formal semantic annotation method to support the mutual understanding of the semantics inside the shared and exchanged information in a PLM environment.
