Design Trend Forecasting by Combining Conceptual Analysis and Semantic Projections: New Tools for Open Innovation

[EN] In this paper, we describe a new trend analysis and forecasting method (Deflexor), which is intended to help inform decisions in almost any field of human social activity, including, for example, business, art and design. As a result of the combination of conceptual analysis, fuzzy mathematics and some new reinforcing learning methods, we propose an automatic procedure based on Big Data that provides an assessment of the evolution of design trends. The resulting tool can be used to study general trends in any field¿depending on the data sets used¿while allowing the evaluation of the future acceptance of a particular design product, becoming in this way, a new instrument for Open Innovation. The mathematical characterization of what is a semantic projection, together with the use of the theory of Lipschitz functions in metric spaces, provides a broad-spectrum predictive tool. Although the results depend on the data sets used, the periods of updating and the sources of general information, our model allows for the creation of specific tools for trend analysis in particular fields that are adaptable to different environments.This research was funded by Istituto Europeo di Design and Generalitat Valenciana, Cátedra de Transparencia y Gestión de Datos, Universitat Politècnica de València (PID2019-105708RBC21 (MICIU/FEDER,UE)).Manetti, A.; Ferrer Sapena, A.; Sánchez Pérez, EA.; Lara-Navarra, P. (2021). Design Trend Forecasting by Combining Conceptual Analysis and Semantic Projections: New Tools for Open Innovation. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity. 7(1):1-26. https://doi.org/10.3390/joitmc7010092S1267

Metric-based Stochastic Conceptual Clustering for Ontologies

A conceptual clustering framework is presented which can be applied to multi-relational knowledge bases storing resource annotations expressed in the standard languages for the Semantic Web. The framework adopts an effective and language-independent family of semi-distance measures defined for the space of individual resources. These measures are based on a finite number of dimensions corresponding to a committee of discriminating features represented by concept descriptions. The clustering algorithm expresses the possible clusterings in terms of strings of central elements (medoids, w.r.t. the given metric) of variable length. The method performs a stochastic search in the space of possible clusterings, exploiting a technique based on genetic programming. Besides, the number of clusters is not necessarily required as a parameter: a natural number of clusters is autonomously determined, since the search spans a space of strings of different length. An experimentation with real ontologies proves the feasibility of the clustering method and its effectiveness in terms of standard validity indices. The framework is completed by a successive phase, where a newly constructed intensional definition, expressed in the adopted concept language, can be assigned to each cluster. Finally, two possible extensions are proposed. One allows the induction of hierarchies of clusters. The other applies clustering to concept drift and novelty detection in the context of ontologies