This article attempts to address an application driven approach to the technical development of an ISO preliminary work item -data model standard for process plant operation and maintenance. The target is to develop a high quality data model, which can be used to build a distributed database for process plant operation support systems. It is crucial that the data model to be defined in an appropriate format so that the database built on top of it can be fast and flexible enough to support multiple real time applications. The application driven approach analyzes the entire application domain including operational activities, their performers, the relationship between them and the data shared. This article describes this approach and its application in the technical development of the work item.