A standardized data schema for material properties in XML is under development to establish a common and exchangeable expression. The next stage toward the management of knowledge about material usage, selection or processing is to define an ontology that represents the structure of concepts related to materials, e.g., definition, classification or properties of material.

Material selection for designing artifacts is a process that translates required material properties into material substances, which in turn requires a definition of data analysis and rules to interpret the result. In this paper, an ontology structure to formalize this kind of process is discussed using an example of the translation of creep property data into design data.