The AsIsKnown IT system for European home textiles producers, distributors and retailers promises major improvements in their global competitiveness. AsIsKnown includes inter-organisational sales support tools, supply chain tools and the ability to analyse trends and fashions in home textiles.
Using the flow of knowledge through AsIsKnown, the home textile companies can harmonise their market offering.
Customer orders are delivered instantly to the relevant product distributors and producers, resulting in greater supplier coordination, faster delivery times, efficiency gains and smaller stockholding along the supply chain.
Seamless selling tools
Retail customers can use AsIsKnown’s Virtual Interior Designer to access product images directly from the databases of the producers. Pillowcases, carpets, curtains or wall paints can be placed in a virtual room or changed with the click of a mouse.
A second sales support tool, AsIsKnown’s Smart Profiler, enables a retail assistant to feed in a customer’s ideas on styles, colours, patterns… and to generate suggestions from available producer information.
Smart Profiler uses PROMOTE, an ontology-based knowledge management system to make better (semantic) searches of the producers’ databases. In other words, PROMOTE turns a mass of data into explicit knowledge available to AsIsKnown’s sales support and trend analysis tools.
Ontological systems search for concepts, not just key words. For instance, the system is capable of interpreting a search for “autumn shades” to deliver solutions that would include dark orange and chocolate brown materials, amongst others.
The AsIsKnown ontology can enable interaction between users who speak different languages. It is equipped with lexicons in English, German, French, Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian. The ontology includes an inference engine for checking the consistency of new information, as well as a search engine, and annotation tools. The ontology ensures that the concepts remain consistent in all cases; their meaning will be the same independent of the users.
