Innovative industrially manufactured products rely on the development of high-performance materials and their fabrication processes. However, a continuous and comprehensive digital model of the relationships between material, process and component or product is not available. Likewise, there is no data integrity and interoperability between the material characterization, simulation and manufacturing applications, which prevents the consistent use of the resulting data and its application to the development of digital assistants based on artificial intelligence. The development of a harmonized ontological description can remedy this situation and thus open up new potentials for data-driven material development and process optimization as well as to establish material cycles.