A short history, scope and initial workplan for the GAO Community Group

Dear all,

Thanks for joining the W3C Automotive Community Group! In this e-mail, we
will explain the scope and history of this group and propose work items and
organization of collaboration.

History
=======
Martin and I have been working on automotive-related Web vocabularies in
various settings for the past few years, including the following four
ontologies in the context of GoodRelations [1]:

    The Vehicle Sales Ontology (VSO),
http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/vso/ns 
    The Car Options Ontology (COO),
http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/vocabularies/coo/ns 
    The Volkswagen Vehicles Ontology (VVO),
http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/vocabularies/vvo/ns 
    The Used Cars Ontology (UCO), http://ontologies.makolab.com/uco/ns.html 

After the integration of GoodRelations into schema.org in 2012, it became
clear that we also need better support for describing car-related aspects of
Web content using schema.org. In the following years, we teamed up to
develop a proposal for extending schema.org with a subset of elements from
VSO, VVO, and UCO. One of the milestones on this path was the panel
discussion during one of the Semantic Web conferences Mirek organized in
Paris in the fall of 2013. During this panel (led by Martin with many
participants from both automotive companies and "semantic web" firms), the
idea of GAO (Generic Automotive Ontology [5]) was born.  

After almost 18 months of public discussion on the W3C Web Schemas Task
Force mailing list ( public-vocabs@w3.org ), the W3C Wiki
(http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebSchemas/Vehicles ), and an informal Google+ group
at https://plus.google.com/communities/104510681993581444051 , the extension
proposal has been recently accepted by the sponsors of schema.org and is
part of the 2.0 release of schema.org.

A few properties from the initial proposal have been held back for a moment
and will form the basis for a "reviewed extension" of schema.org, to be
released in the coming weeks. Reviewed extensions constitute a new mechanism
in schema.org that allows partitioning the schema.org vocabulary into a
"core", which should mainly hold elements relevant for a very broad set of
Web pages and other content, and extension modules, which will reside in a
separated namespace under the schema.org umbrella, yet receive the same
level of consideration by search engine crawlers.

The Birth of the Community Group
================================
At this point, Dan Brickley suggested, and we happily agreed, that the
informal working group should aim for a more formal organization in the form
of a W3C Community Group  (CG) [2].

Briefly speaking, this has the following advantages:

1. Transparency
The discussions are public and persistently archived.

2. Legal framework for contributions
The W3C provides ground rules and processes for defining the IPR framework
for contributions, which simplifies the process of deriving e.g. W3C
standards or other public materials resulting from the collaboration [3].

3. Tools and infrastructure
The W3C provides useful tools and infrastructure, see [4].

A W3C Community Group can be joined by anybody. W3C membership is NOT
required.

Scope and work plan
==================
In the CG, we wish to advance the use of shared conceptual structures in the
form of Web ontologies for better data interoperability in the automotive
industry, and this at Web scale. In particular, we want to develop extension
proposals for schema.org so that automotive information can be better
understood by search engines and OWL Web ontologies for the automotive
industry. Moreover, we want to provide a forum for bringing together
researchers and practitioners who are working on advancing the field.

As a first proposal from the chairs, to be discussed in the forum, we think
the group should work on the following items:

D00	Charter and Scope documents
D01	GAO Core: A schema.org-compliant fundamental ontology for vehicle
information in e-commerce
D02	GAO Compatibility: A schema.org-compliant ontology for vehicle
configuration information
D03	GAO Vehicle Lifetime Information: A schema.org-compliant ontology
for vehicle life-time information
D04	GAO Vehicle Data Backbone: An ontology for information interchange
within a vehicle, between vehicles, and between vehicles and their external
entities

D01 will mainly be the place to maintain and enhance the automotive branch
in schema.org core and auto.schema.org.

Modus of Work
=============
We would like to organize the majority of work via the public mailing list
at https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-gao/. We may organize
conference calls if necessary.
Again, thanks for joining the group! We are looking forward to working with
you on advancing automotive data on the World Wide Web!

Best regards,
Mirek Sopek and Martin Hepp
(Chairs)
PS.1 - If anyone from our community is planning to attend the forthcoming
TU-Automotive Detroit conference (next week: June 3-4), let us know - Mirek
will be there, and it could be a great opportunity to meet in person in the
best "automotive" context.
PS.2 - If you get this message twice, I do apologize - my first sending did
not have proper sender address.

[1] http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/
[2] https://www.w3.org/community/about/
[3] https://www.w3.org/community/about/agreements/
[4] https://www.w3.org/community/about/tool/
[5] http://www.automotive-ontology.org/

Received on Thursday, 28 May 2015 20:51:32 UTC