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Manufacturing companies have to manage a large amount of data and information. This is due to both the presence of advanced sensors systems at the shop floor level and to the spreading of simulation and decision support software tools. The exchange of simulated and real data can be effective only if interoperability is guaranteed. However, most of the software tools are based on their own data models and proprietary file formats, thus jeopardizing the interoperability. This paper presents the outcomes of a European research project, named Virtual Factory Framework (VFF), that aims at developing an integrated virtual environment to enable the interoperability between software tools supporting the factory processes along all the phases of its lifecycle. The cornerstone of the proposed VFF consists in a common Virtual Factory Data Model (VFDM) that can be considered as the shared meta-language providing a common definition of the data that are shared among the software tools connected to the framework. Semantic web technologies have been adopted to develop the VFDM because of their ability in representing formal semantics, and efficiently modeling and manage distributed data.