Digitalization is omnipresent in our daily experience. Therefore, it is often postulated that we already live in a fully digital world neglecting that we are still physical beings in a physical world. Whereas it is relatively straight forward to digitally handle digital artefacts the systematic to digitally permeate the physical world is still subject to varied approaches necessitating scientific coverage. And what could be more physical than materials?

The DLR Institute for Test and Simulation for Gas Turbines therefore is implementing its outstanding materials testing and simulation capabilities in a frame of seamless digitalization using ontologies in conjunction with a graph database. Taken together they inherently facilitate consistency and tracability in a structured but non-hierarchical and unlimited expandable way. This allows to start digitalizing the physical world without the need to have everything molded from the beginning.

In the presentation this methodology will be sketched out to illustrate the benefits in terms of interoperability, processes management and thus efficiency.