GeniusTex Smart Textiles Ontology - enabling smart textiles product and process development with semantic technologies

Smart Textiles are clothes with an extended range of functions, e.g., interaction with the environment. They open up new markets and business models in sports, health, home and living, mobility or building applications, especially in combination with digital networked services. However, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the electronics and textile industries hesitate to accept the complexity of the combined value chains.
The research project “GeniusTex” helps SMEs to successfully participate in smart textiles by making the product and process development more efficient. For this, the concepts of modularization, semantic web ontologies, and co-innovation have been applied.
The newly developed smart textile ontology can represent the complex interdependencies between properties of textile materials, electronics, and integrating and contacting technologies as a set of rules, serving as a “common language” and speeding up the development process. It forms the foundation of the co-innovation platform “GeniusTex” that allows users like textile and electronics manufacturers, designers and app developers to find partners to implement smart textile projects. The approach has been tested with multiple smart textile products from idea to prototype construction.