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Fashion and Style Trends

An interesting area for data mining is fashion and style trends. Understanding what people want now and how that influences what people might want in future. How tastes and fashion changes over time. It seems fashion is a very unpredictable affair. Often styles are influenced by multiple factors. Especially, trends develop from word of mouth even by noticing what a celebrity has can create a fad. Perhaps, social trends are important as a measure of predicting or even forecasting to some degree what will be on next so people can design and purchase. WGSN, Trendzine, Editd are a few interesting sources for fashion trend forecasting and analysis. There are obviously others that provide trend intelligence. However, as a commercial service a lot of the data is closed for inspection and accessibility with an added premium. It may be an idea to explore fashion as a semantic ontology by way of curating data. Then providing such data in an open data format for much analytical inspection on the web. Social influence graphs and sentiments could also help in assessing the right factors as to where a particular trend is likely to be in near future as well as individual preferences. Fashion trends are especially appropriate to women and there is a huge market that can be tapped. Better fashion sense means people will be more informed about what they should buy now as opposed to later. Also, it helps shops and designers plan their products and sales more appropriately. It also means people are always aware of what is currently trending in market now and potentially in next twelve months. Obviously, the more long-term the forecast is, the less accurate the information gain will appear.

Using big data to forecast the fashion future
Dress to kill how semantic web can help

Social Networking in Society

Social Networking has become a major contributing factor in how people connect with others both at work and within their social lives. It is even a way for people to meetup with shared interests with like minded individuals. It even provides a unique scope to analytics and in understanding sociology as well as psychology of people especially on social group interactions. Businesses gain a lot of insights from social networking on brand management and product launches. Different attitudes to particular subjects and opinions can be mined in often near real-time. However, one looks at it social networking has allowed people to connect in creative ways in globally dispersed environments. But, one thing is for certain it also poses a risk to peoples' infringement on their personal information. So, much of personal information is now available on people online that is quite a scary thought in how identity theft has become such a security issue. Advertising platforms also do not help within social networking as they often require a certain level of individual information before such contextual ads can be produced. Facebook over the years has changed a lot of their features on their platform reducing the level of security on protecting personal information. Many social networking sites also have an almost bell shaped curve trend about them. People slowly start to lose interest and move on to something else. It becomes no longer a new but the old as people move on to other things. When Myspace came into existence it was the new thing on the block. Soon as Facebook arrived the Myspace following reduced significantly. And, as Twitter arrived on the block so many have switched over and lost confidence in Facebook. Perhaps, in time the current social networking approaches will change in future and look to converge more security for personal information and provide for more unique user experiences.