Development projects are prone to continuous changes, whether because of additional insights or changes of requirmenents. To execute changes in a controlled and traceable manner, standardized methods and processes are used in product development, often as part of configuration management. The IT-support of configuration management with defined workflows and release mechanisms is provided by product data management systems (PDM). However, these often fail to acknowledge organizational and financial effects of a change on project management. To remedy this deficit, the article proposes an integrated project/macro-product model implemented by a semantic web and an ontology. This integrated model can be used to run metrics to analyse technical and commercial effects of a change thus improving the change management process as a whole.
