A Semantic-Based Information Management System to Support Innovative Product Design

International competition and the rapidly global economy, unified by improved communication and transportation, offer to the consumers an enormous choice of goods and services. The result is that companies now require quality, value, time to market and innovation to be successful in order to win the increasing competition. In the engineering sector this is traduced in need of optimization of the design process and in maximization of re-use of data and knowledge already existing in the company. The “SIMI-Pro” (Semantic Information Management system for Innovative Product design) system addresses specific deficiencies in the conceptual phase of product design when knowledge management, if applied, is often sectorial. Its main contribution is in allowing easy, fast and centralized collection of data from multiple sources and in supporting the retrieval and re-use of a wide range of data that will help stylists and engineers shortening the production cycle. SIMI-Pro will be one of the first prototypes to base its information management and its knowledge sharing system on process ontology and it will demonstrate how the use of centralized network systems, coupled with Semantic Web technologies, can improve inter-working activities and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing

Towards an automatic semantic annotation of car aesthetics

The design of a new car is guided by a set of directives indicating the target market and specific engineering and aesthetic constraints, which may include also the preservation of the company brand identity or the restyling of products already on the market. When creating a new product designers are used to evaluating other existing products to take inspiration or to possibly reuse successful solutions. In the perspective of an optimised styling workflow a great benefit could come from the opportunity of easily retrieving the related documentation and existing digital models both from internal and external repositories. In fact, the rapid growth of the web contents and the widely spread adoption of computerassisted design tools have made a huge amount of digital data available, whose exploitation could be improved by more selective retrieval methods. In particular, the retrieval of aesthetic elements may help designers to more efficiently create digital models conforming to specific styling properties. The aim of the research described in this document is the definition of a framework able to support a (semi-) automatic extraction of semantic data from 3D models and other multimedia data to allow car designers to reuse knowledge and design solutions within the styling department. The first objective is then capturing and structuring both the explicit and implicit elements that contribute to the car aesthetics and can be realistically tackled through computational models and methods. The second step is the definition of a system architecture able to transfer such semantics through an automatic annotation of car models

Communication and collaboration within a VR sysytem for architectural design

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:DXN061154 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Art Galleries and Museums.

In the past decades personalised content delivery has been only achieved through traditional audio-guides. These feature a very primitive form of interaction, mostly based on a keypad where the user selects a number corresponding to the exhibit he/she wants to be informed about. It is clear that such limitation can be clearly overcome by the adoption of modern multimedia-based applications. Furthermore recent development of mobile hardware, such as the last generation mobile phones or Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), it gives, for the first time, the chance to exploit notable processing power available on very light and portable devices, that few years back was only available on standard personal computers. The work presented in this paper fosters such novel approach by proposing an interactive portable system that supports the user during a visit to a museum by providing customised multimedia data

Topological Descriptor for CAD Models with Inner Cavities

The current work introduces an algorithm for constructing Reeb graph for CAD models and their inner cavities. The nodes of the graph represent areas of the manifold of the model where topological changes occur. Edges of the graph encode information about connections between such areas. The outline for the topological graph matching is given for detection of graph (sub)isomorphism. The proposed Reeb graph structure can be used as a descriptor of CAD models in the retrieval process