In this paper, a preliminary program was proposed to construct a data warehouse for materials data in order to support materials selection in mechanical design. The major advantage for having such a data warehouse is that all different types of materials information could be potentially integrated to facilitate a uniform data access under the same umbrella of the data warehouse and as a result, the detail-intensive materials selection procedure may be simplified as a querying process into the data warehouse. Moreover, on top of the materials data warehouse, further exploration on voluminous materials data such as pattern recognition and data mining could be supported for research on materials discovery and materials design.