Abstract
Purpose - The main purpose of this paper is to briefly discuss the concept of product data management (PDM) describing the contributions, objectives and some currently existing challenges.Design methodology approach - By targeting the described challenges, it proposes a new semantic-oriented agent and knowledge base approach and presents its conceptual and implementation designs. The available prototype version of the proposed approach is also briefly discussed.Findings - The PDM community is facing some challenges especially in intelligent PDM development, i.e. unfriendly graphical machine interface, unintelligent search and unstandardized-based platform independent PDM system deployment and deployment framework.Originality value - An intelligent semantic-oriented agent-based search is an original and new solution.