In process industries, large amounts of heterogeneous information are generated. However, the overall system is too complex and dynamic to be fully described in a formal way. The projects Sidap and FEE investigate the use of big data and smart data in this domain. Though the projects have different focuses, they face a number of similar challenges. These challenges are summarized and ways are suggested to overcome them, like establishing a basis for the common understanding of data or the enrichment of data with additional meta-information.