A s emant i c-ba s ed know ledge flow system for the Europea n home textiles industry

1. Asemantic-based knowledge flow system for the European home textiles industry 01/04/2006 - 31/03/2009 Version 26.07.2006 AsIsKnown is a project funded within the Information Society Technologies (IST) Priority of the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) of the European Commission. www.AsIsKnown.org

2. Producer curtains Producer carpeting Producer furnishing Retail sales Consumer

3. Producer curtains Producer carpeting Producer furnishing Retail sales Consumer Today: Broken communication between producer and consumer / missing knowledge about market needs

4. Producer curtains Producer carpeting Producer furnishing Retail sales Consumer Today: Broken horizontal and vertical communication / missing knowledge about market needs AsIsKnown: Optimized communication to a complete network: Market transparency through a common knowledge base

5. The AsIsKnown flow of information The workflow of the AsIsKnown system is to collect the product data of different European home textile producers in one system for customer consulting, ordering and overall analysing of customer behaviour. The first step will be to collect the product data of different home textile producers.

6. The AsIsKnown flow of information This data will be prepared, unified and interpreted for further usage in step two (Smart Profiler).

7. The AsIsKnown flow of information In the third step, these data will be used in a customer consulting and ordering system (Virtual Interior Designer) to offer producer-independent home textile combinations. This system will receive orders and protocol the customer behaviour during its decision process.

8. The AsIsKnown flow of information In the fourth step, the information about the ordered combinations and the user behaviour will be collected and analysed by data- and text mining tools to detect actual and future trends in the home textile sector (Trend Analyser).

9. The AsIsKnown flow of information The orders and the results of the analysing process will be redirected to the different producers. The results of the analysing process will also be used by the customer consulting system to generate new style world proposals (fifth and sixth steps).

10. Tobias Valtinat, Wolfgang Backhaus ZLW/IMA der RWTH AachenDennewartstraße 27 52068 Aachen Germany Consortium and Project Partners RWTH Aachen University, ZLW/IMA Center for Learning and Knowledge Management and Department of Computer Science in Mechanical Engineering The Center for Learning and Knowledge Management and Department of Computer Science in Mechanical Engineering is a main interdisciplinary research institute of RWTH Aachen University carrying out the work in AsIsKnown. The institute will coordinate and manage AsIsKnown. The IMA part of the institute will lead Workpackage 7 (Back office Ordering System for semantic web services) which constitutes one element of the technology baseline and development. The ZLW/IMA will ensure a highly integrative information and knowledge transfer as well as the scientific and technological management and controlling within AsIsKnown.

11. Robert Woitsch BOC Information Technologies Consulting GmbH Bäckerstraße 5A 1010 Wien (Vienna) Austria Consortium and Project Partners BOC Information and Technologies Consulting BOC is a software development house and a strategic consultant in business process re-engineering and knowledge management projects. It was founded in 1995 as a spin-off from the Department of Knowledge Engineering at the University of Vienna. BOC brings its strong expertise in Meta2Modelling concepts do design knowledge and semantic issues into the project. BOC will lead the Workpackage 4 (Architecture and Implementation of Smart Profiler). BOC will be responsible for software and hardware integration and testing tasks as the Smart Profiler will be dependent on interfaces with the surrounding soft- and hardware.

12. Andreas Becks Fraunhofer FIT, RWTH Aachen, Informatik VAhornstr. 55, 52056 Aachen Germany Consortium and Project Partners Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology Fraunhofer-FIT investigates human-centered computing in a process context, focusing on usability and usefulness of information and cooperation systems in their interplay between human work practice, organization and process. Fraunhofer-FIT brings its strong expertise in content access & retrieval, text mining, UI design, and user/process analysis into the AsIsKnown project. Fraunhofer-FIT will lead the Workpackage 8 (Architecture and Implementation of Trend Analyser).

13. Kiril Simov Linguistic Modelling Laboratory, IPP, Acad. G.Bonchev Str. 25A, 1113 Sofia, Bulgaria Consortium and Project Partners Institute for Parallel Processing, Bulgarian Academy of Science The Linguistic Modelling Laboratory (LML), a department of the Institute for Parallel Processing (IPP) of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) will lead Workpackage 3 (Common sense ontology engineering) and Workpackage 5 (Multimedia ontology) as key enablers for the semantic-based knowledge flow system. Since its establishment in 1987, the LML hosted a number of projects dealing with the application of knowledge representation to natural language processing from two different perspectives - using represented knowledge for tasks of semantic analysis and exploring methods for representation and acquisition of linguistic knowledge itself.

14. Paul Aichner Crystal Design Eisackstrasse 1 39040 Vahrn (Brixen) Italy Consortium and Project Partners Crystal Design Crystal Design develops and markets overall solutions for optimising sales and distributions processes of consultant intensive consumer goods such as furniture and furnishing equipment and investment goods. Crystal Design develops tools for Visual Merchandising and POS-Marketing in virtual show rooms and “style worlds”. Crystal Design will be responsible for the Workpackage 6 which deals with the architecture and implementation of the Virtual Interior Designer. Crystal Designs’ main efforts are located in the area of technology baseline work, as all other software partners. Interfaces and links to the surrounding tools of AsIsKnown will be achieved through cooperation with the responsible partners.

15. Christiane Finetti TFI - Teppichforschungsinstitut Charlottenburger Allee 4152068 Aachen Germany Consortium and Project Partners TFI Textile and Flooring Institute The Textiles & Flooring Institute GmbH (TFI) is a modern service company operating especially in the field of home textiles and flooring systems. The service activities of the institute include the testing and certification of products in view of environmental, consumer protection and quality aspects as well as consulting and training for industry, commerce and trade. The main field of responsibility of TFI within AsIsKnown will be the scientific support and S&T management of the partners from the home textiles industry. To fulfil this function the TFI leads Workpackage 2 (Requirements Inquiry and Analysis) and Workpackage 9 (Evaluation).

16. Thomas Weber Leiter Marketing Vorwerk & Co.Teppichwerke GmbH & Co.KGKuhlmannstraße 1131785 Hameln Germany Consortium and Project Partners Vorwerk & Co. Teppichwerke GmbH & Co. KG Vorwerk produces textile floor coverings meeting superior demands of private and professional objects for more than a hundred years. Today, this company is a leading high quality supplier for middle and high-class design-orientated carpets in the middle and upper price segments. Within AsIsKnown Vorwerk will be involved in the field of dissemination and exploitation. Qualified sales representatives will promote the Trend Analyser to potential customers and will receive feedback from the users. They will grant access to their assortment of samples and to their legacy system. The major key tasks of Vorwerk will be to enrich the requirements analysis and thus to orientate AsIsKnown towards real market needs.

17. Mr. Károly Fazakas INKU Budafoki út 183, 1117 Budapest, Hungary Consortium and Project Partners INKU Nemzetközi Kereskedelmi Kft INKU, as a Hungarian subsidiary of INKU AG, is a leading trader and service provider company in Hungary. INKU will grant access to their assortment of samples and to their legacy system, thus the INKU will co-operate closely with the software developing partners. Furthermore, INKU will be involved in the field of exploitation. Qualified sales representatives will promote the Trend Analyser to potential customers and will receive feedback from the users at the point of sales.

18. Yves Minassian U.F.T.M. Rue du Vert Bois 3 59531 Neuville-en-Ferrain France Consortium and Project Partners UFTM Union Française des Tapis et Moquettes UFTM is a French Trade Association which unites carpet manufacturers and importers as well as retailer and sellers of interior and home textiles for use as floor and wall coverings. UFTM will contribute on the one hand with its network to determine the specifications for the engineering of the Virtual Interior Designer tool and by providing data (collections, samples etc.) made available by its members. On the other hand UFTM will lead Workpackage 10 (Dissemination and Exploitation, because of the contact to its members and to international acting supply chains (e.g. 3 Suisses, Mondial Moquette). Exploitation channels and prospects can be found within these networks.

19. Key Objectives AsIsKnown provides for the - producers (carpeting, furnishing, curtains),- retail sales and - consumers a customized, dynamic support system, that includes jointly harmonized trend lines across organisations. The main scientific and technological objective is a semantic-based knowledge flow system for the European home textiles industry AsIsKnown consisting of - the Smart Profiler and a Multimedia / Common Sense-Ontology - the Virtual Interior Designer and a Ordering System, - the Trend Analyser.

20. Main Innovations of AsIsKnown The main innovation of AsIsKnown is the complete support of a novel interorganisational business process via the use of semantic web components. The scenario of the European home textile industry has been selected as the showcase of an interorganisational business process. As a showcase for semantic web components three semantic web componentes (smart profiler, virtual interior designer, trend analyser) has been selected. This scenario implies the translation and the mapping of semantic information on various levels as pointed out in detail in the following slides.

21. Expected Impact The European home textiles industry as showcase Source: EURATEX on CIFRS data, 2003 Structure of the European Technology Platform for the future of Textiles and Clothing Breakdown of textile production into 3 sub-sectors by volume of fibre usage

22. Expected Impact Customisation and personalisation The individual and harmonised presentation of different textile products in a virtual environment will stimulate the customer. The customisation of textile-based goods is a “path” to fight against counterfeiting and piracy. Trend analysing AsIsKnown will provide a system which enables the user to generate harmonised trend lines quicker, therefore AsIsKnown will shorten the time-to-production. The generation of complete living environments allows to derivate trends with regard to combinations of different products.

23. Contact Dr.-Ing. Tobias Valtinat ZLW/IMA der RWTH Aachen Dennewartstr. 27 52068 Aachen Germany Phone: +49 241 80-911-37   Fax: +49 241 80-911-22   E-Mail: valtinat@zlw-ima.rwth-aachen.de Wolfgang Backhaus, M.A.  ZLW/IMA der RWTH Aachen  Dennewartstr. 27  52068 Aachen Germany  Phone: +49 241 80-911-61  Fax: +49 241 80-911-22  E-Mail: backhaus@zlw-ima.rwth-aachen.de