@ND > as mentioned at the ENOVIA Conference, there are some questions about core- and covering material management, I will discuss here as there was not enough time:

Feeding and synchronizing material from "outside" sources.
Today, many companies do already have some kind of external, independent material databases existing. Right now, I do only know the CATIA client option to create and manage new core- and covering material and its domains manually.
Question: Is there a strategy or are there tools existing to synchronize such external databases (I did not find any Restful Services for material classes... maybe there is another option or strategy to consider)

Material management in MultiCAD environment
Actually, there is a comprehensive support for MultiCAD data management and working in context for all geometrical purpose. But what about managing material definition in MultiCAD constellation. Actually, all CAD system do have its individual objects and processes to handle such material definition. By Engineering Release, we are able to place a material definition onto the Physical Product instance for all kinds of CAD data and this might be sufficient for BOM definition, but there is no interaction to the "local" material handling inside the CAD system where also a reliable definition is needed for e.g., CAD specific weight management. 
Question: Are there strategies existing (or maybe already mapping options), to synchronize individual CAD material definition with the 3DEXPERIENCE material definition? Or what would be the suggested strategy to handle this topic?

Logical relations between materials
(maybe this is a pretty specific demand of one of our customer)
In some scenarios, materials do have historical relations. Best example would be a hardening process, where the material definition after hardening has relations to the material definition after hardening process. The material would just change individual attributes inside but over all would stay the same base material. This could be covered by creating 2 core materials (one as un-processed and one as hardened material) but now it would be good to bring these two materials into a logical dependency to be able to track the history. Actually I theoretically just found the "Branch" option as an capable approach to handle such variation of one and the same material but I'm not sure, if this would be the intend of DS to handle such demand.
Question: Is there an official strategy to handle this demand?

I think, most severe is the the topic for synchronizing with external databases for our customer and maybe a solution can also solve the other demands (maybe > if there is an answer, we can use this technology to synchronize 3DX database with local CAD databases and keep them aligned...).

Would be great to get some information about the strategies for mentioned topics, not to search for workaround solutions, already covered by DS by other tools and apps.