The design of a new car is guided by a set of directives indicating
the target market, specific engineering, and aesthetic constraints, which
may also include the preservation of the company brand identity or the
restyling of products already on the market. When creating a new product,
designers usually evaluate other existing products to find sources of
inspiration or to possibly reuse successful solutions. In the perspective
of an optimized styling workflow, great benefit could be derived from the
possibility of easily retrieving the related documentation and existing
digital models both from internal and external repositories. In fact, the
rapid growth of resources on the Web and the widespread adoption of
computer-assisted design tools have made available huge amounts of data,
the utilization of which could be improved by using more selective
retrieval methods. In particular, the retrieval of aesthetic elements may
help designers to create digital models conforming to specific styling
properties more efficiently. The aim of our research is the definition of
a framework that supports (semi)automatic extraction of semantic data from
three-dimensional models and other multimedia data to allow car designers
to reuse knowledge and design solutions within the styling department. The
first objective is then to capture and structure the explicit and implicit
elements contributing to the definition of car aesthetics, which can be
realistically tackled through computational models and methods. The second
step is the definition of a system architecture that is able to transfer
such semantic evaluation through the automatic annotation of car
models.