The AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry has been undergoing a significant digitaliza-tion process in the last years. This transformation implies new challenges and adaptation concerning the ex-change of data between different software applications. Therefore, in response to this problem the benefits of IFC as a solution for the exchange of data have been investigated. However, the current versions of IFC cannot achieve semantic clarity in mapping entities and relationships. Therefore, there have been several attempts to develop solutions and optimizing methods to improve the exchange of information of product data. This paper aims to identify and investigate the challenges of using product data templates (PDT) for exchange of infor-mation and different PDT has been evaluated and compared. The necessary data was collected through literature review and document analysis. Five challenges and five initiatives were identified during the literature review. The five initiatives are Semantic web and linked data, CoClass, Buildingsmart, COBie and Cobuilder. The result showed how these initiatives could solve the identified challenges.