Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

The information phase is a crucial phase of any design activity. It has a direct impact on the creativity involved in generating design solutions and subsequently on any future innovations. The gradual digitalization of the design process, especially where computers can aid human creativity, is progressively changing the earliest phases of the design activity, and in particular the information phase. As a routine part of the creative process, designers search for and collect inspirational materials. The TRENDS computer-based system aims to improve designers’ access to web-based resources by helping them to find appropriate materials, structure these materials in way that supports their design activities and identify design trends. This will be achieved through the development of flexible content-based image retrieval facilities that utilise ontological referencing related to Conjoint Trends Analysis (CTA). This paper deals with the definition of a domain ontology based on the designer’s expertise. It studies the correspondence between high-level and low-level descriptors which use the CTA’s semantic structure based on the Values-Functions-Solutions chain. The domain ontology developed in Protégé currently comprises 503 instances grouped in 10 classes.