Interfacing fast-fashion design industries with Semantic Web technologies: The case of Imperial Fashion

With the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, several enterprises worldwide have started to evolve their production processes with new automation and data exchange policies by means of the adoption of emergent technologies, i.e. knowledge graphs, sensor networks, big data, and cloud computing. While several domains have been already involved in this revolution, other parties, such as the fast-fashion industries, have started to move the first steps in that direction since few months. In this article we describe the first outcomes of a project, i.e. Refactoring Imperial Selling Data (RISED), which aims at using Semantic Web technologies so as to simplify the management and the enrichment of a huge set of data that are continuously collected by Imperial Fashion, one of the most important fast-fashion companies in Italy. In particular, we introduce the process adopted for the development of a unifying model (i.e. an OWL 2 DL ontology) for the description of all the Imperial Fashion data and we propose some mechanisms for converting the original data stored in existing databases according to the new ontology. Finally, we introduce some prototypical visual tools that use the converted data for addressing some of the questions that have been raised by Imperial Fashion employees during several informal meetings we had about the project RISED.