The ongoing globalization in almost all markets leads to a wide range of IT-related challenges. Focusing on development processes in mechanical engineering disciplines as they occur in automotive industry, globalization requires a continuously and location-independent provision of software tools and project-oriented data. This involves both supply of a large amount of different commercial software packages for various engineering disciplines as well as handling of large amount of data, configurations, different projects, sites and employee-related information. The broad field of computational design and engineering disciplines within automotive development requires a strong interaction in view of efficient software applications. Especially the CAD-based design phase is characterized by a cooperation of manufacturer and supplier, which often use dissimilar CAD software with different versions or even different vendors. Previous research work focused on development and application of knowledge-based...