Given that the amount of product data in firms is explosively increasing, a PDM system for effective data management is considered indispensable for product development. However, considerable time and specialized human resources are needed to customize a generic PDM system for satisfying the specific requirements of individual firms. To overcome this problem, we propose the use of UML object models in a PDM authoring framework. A PDM authoring framework, which provides authoring functions for the effective customization of PDM systems, will reduce the need for the intervention of PDM specialists in the design of the object models of the PDM system. We describe how a PDM authoring framework may be designed by using UML object models, and show how model-oriented application development (MOAD), in conjunction with the PDM authoring framework, can be used to build object models into a PDM system. Furthermore, we confirm the value of the framework by evaluating its performance under several conditions.