How to insure interoperability of enterprise applications, in particular for the industrial product development domain, and within the virtual enterprise? An innovative approach is proposed, based on creation of open collaboration framework aiming to federate legacy solutions, and not to replace them. From a methodological point of view, non-interoperability causes will be clearly identified and analysed, in particular missing governance infrastructure for industrial or information projects, partionning resulting from technologies, modelling paradigms, scopes imposed by project based approaches and finally usage of different incomptible formalisms used by actors of each phase of a project.
Flexibility required for always changing environments an spiral approach, more adapted when defining and exploiting an infrastructure for long term, will make systematic usage of model driven engineering, ontology and semantic mediation in order to reconciliate the different involved universes. In addition to methodologic approach, demonstrators will be produced and used in concrete industrial contexts, in order to validate accuracy of proposed concepts. It is particulary important as interoperability is considered as the quality of concrete operational systems: it is consequently not possible to address it only at the conceptual level.