Today 3D objects have become widely available in different application domains, thus it is becoming fundamental to use, integrate and develop techniques for extracting and maintaining their implicit knowledge. These techniques should be encapsulated in intelligent systems able to semantically annotate the 3D models, thus improving their usability and indexing, especially in innovative web cooperative environments. In our work, we are moving in this direction, by defining and developing data structures, methods and interfaces for structuring and semantically annotating 3D complex models (and scenes), even changing over time, according to ontology-driven metadata. In this paper, we focus on tools and methods for manually segmenting manifold 3D models and on the underline structural representation that we build and manipulate. We present also an interface from which the user can inspect and browse the segmentation, describing also the first prototype of an annotation tool which allows a hierarchical semantic-driven tagging of the segmented model.