Product lifecycle simulation (PLCS) has been given ever moreattention as the manufacturers are competing with the quality and lifecyclecosts of their products. Especially, the need of companies to try to get a strongposition in providing services for their products and thus to make themselvesless vulnerable to changes in the market has led to high interest in PLCS. Ashort summary of current status of PLCS is presented especially related to thepoor integration of data in product lifecycle management systems and in PLCS.The potential of applying semantic data management to solve these problems isthoroughly discussed in the light of recent development. A basic roadmap howthe above-described problems could be tackled with open software solutions ispresented. Finally, this paper reviews the emergent Web technologies such asthe Semantic Web framework and the Web services.