The imposed reduction of product development time demands an optimisation of cross-skill engineering collaborative work. As a contribution to this, we propose to federate established engineering IS-tools and related processes on the basis of shared engineering models rather than to integrate or to harmonize them by a long term IS strategy. Based on an examplery architecture, the challenges of this approach with respect to the necessary data mapping between skill-specific engineering models and the needed semantic capabilities of a language for its usage are outlined