Nanotechnology offers great potentials for improved product properties and innovative functionalities which have to be considered in the product development in an early stage and compared with product requirements. In practice, a gap is to be recognised between nanotechnology and product development. An approach to close the gap and to improve the interoperability is to define a common language based on a functional-based view. The formalisation and mapping of the functions uses semantic nets and ontologies in order to allow a dynamic expanding and machine readability. Thus, applications and nanotechnology will be linked with the objective of generation new product ideas by nanotechnology.
