Support for ontology evolution in the trend related industry sector

Ontologies provide a shared and common understanding between people and application systems. Ontology-based knowledge management systems have proven to be useful in different domains. Due to the lack of support for quick and flexible evolution of underlying ontologies, they are difficult to apply in creative and dynamic domains where domain specific and technical knowledge is quickly evolving. A representative for such a domain is the home textile industry. In this paper we have analysed the requirements of ontology evolution using results from research on knowledge creation for this creative domain. We present a system to support marketing experts and designers by a visual and ontology-based knowledge management system. The system allows for the integration of explicit requirements from the experts (top-down) as well as semi-automatically derived requirements (bottom-up) to change and evolve the ontology used.