The aim of this paper is to summarize the main basic concepts for data integration during a product's life cycle. This integration is necessary in order to favour a more efficient communication between collaborators from inside or outside the company, in a distributed design or e-design context. The information is based on models that structure the concepts and allow their re-use due to the memorization of design history. The current evolutions extend the prospective fields of this approach both to earlier stages (functional aspects, etc) and to later stages (logistics, recycling, etc). There remain, in a global vision of the enterprise, many prospective fields that should allow the total traceability of products during their life cycle.