Companies are losing competitiveness because inefficient data management is becoming a bottleneck to the timely completion of process engineering projects. We describe progress on a project with the aim of solving this problem by developing a new type of data management system. British Gas plc are providing real data and feed back about the utility of our prototype systems. We outline our view of data types, databases and approaches to data management. We explain the basis of and briefly describes a version of the for managing structured numeric and unstructured document-type data that has been implemented on a central computer. We describe the concept-based approach of the POINTER System and make proposals for realising the full potential of the system design in a federal distributed data management system.