Aesthetic knowledge is ubiquitous in the common-sense description and evaluation of both material things and intellectual objects, and many everyday decisions are based on the judgement of aesthetic properties of the admissible choices.
A recent qualitative sociological analysis, shows the increasing perceived importance and pervasiveness of aesthetic values:

Having spent a century or more focused primarily on other goal-solving manufacturing problems, lowering costs, making goods and services widely available [...] we are increasingly engaged in making our world special. We are demanding and creating an enticing, stimulating, diverse, and beautiful world. We want our vacuum cleaners and mobile phones to sparkle, our bathroom faucets and desk accessories to express our personalities. [...] We demand trees in our parking lots, peaked roofs and decorative facades on our supermarkets, auto dealerships as swoopy and stylish as the cars they sell. (from "The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness", by Virgina Postrel, 2003)

Nowadays, material and immaterial production and distribution have been mastered so well, that function and value of industrial artifacts become givens, thus making style and look-and-feel issues the main battlefield of marginal competition. Design, therefore, has come to have real and substantive economic value.

As a consequence of this trend, there is a growing interest toward the nascent field of Computer Aided Aesthetic Design (CAAD), that aims at developing software tools that:

• handle aesthetic knowledge as a first-class citizen, enabling its representation, storage, querying and sharing;
• link aesthetic knowledge to non-aesthetic knowledge, supporting inter-operability between semantically-augmented software tools and more traditional ones, and enabling communication between aesthetic and engineering designers.

Within this broad context, I am focusing my investigation toward the following two open themes:

1. the definition of a formal language for the representation of the aesthetic proprieties of human artifacts (first as a formal ontology, and then as a structured metadata language for the “semantic” mark-up);
2. the study of the concept of aesthetic judgement, seen asan arbitrary, purely qualitative decision following from the evaluation of a decision problem that involves multiple strictly incompatible and irreducible criteria. Specifically, the aim is toward the explicit representation of the justification of the judgement.

See also: some books related to aesthetic KR.