Enterprises today face many challenges related to lack of interoperability. Enterprise applications and software systems need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business across organisational boundaries and thus achieve virtual networked organisations. IEEE defines interoperability as “the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged”. MDA is the OMG instantiation of an approach to software development kown as Model Driven Engineering (MDE) or Model Driven Development (MDD). MDD focuses on Models as the primary artefacts in the development process, with Transformations as the primary operation on models, used to map information from one model to another. There is presently an important paradigm shift in the field of software engineering that may have important consequences on the way information systems are built and maintained. Model-driven development (MDD), and in particular OMG's Model-Driven Architecture ® (MDA®), is emerging as the state of practice for developing modern enterprise applications and software systems. The MDD paradigm improves the way of addressing and solving interoperability issues compared to earlier non-modelling approaches. However, developing correct and useful models is not an easy task. We believe that there is a need for an interoperability framework that provides guidance on how MDD should be applied to address interoperability. A key to the success of MDD is the development of ontologies supporting the mapping from one model to another, either at the same level of abstraction or at different levels. Various approaches have been proposed and tested, starting from common ontologies, shared by all the models, to local ontologies, specific to each software. We propose here to discuss the applicability of MDD to the urban civil engineering (UCE) field. This should help to establish the requirements for ontologies to be applied for interoperability of systems commonly used in this domain. In the first section of this paper, we briefly introduce some key principles of the MDA approach and the role of ontologies in model transformation approaches. The following section describes the Model Driven Development (MDD) interoperability framework. The last part presents a way of applying the MDA techniques to urban civil engineering projects, with the objective of testing the feasibility and relevancy of the approach to this domain.