Re: Vehicles, and customizable products

>
>
> and "Hatchback" ? such as this Freebase identifier for the same value :
> https://www.freebase.com/m/01cmcs
>
> I would ideally love to see a "data dictionary" or "guide" for your Specs
> so that others could help participate with you, and not have to deal with
> Configuration UIDs from your API service endpoint.  I think just providing
> the community with this data dictionary, would be extremely helpful to
> coordinate efforts all around with folks.
>
>
> I'd love it too and we're working on that. As I said, we have to work
> internally to reduce the number of identifiers that we use for the same
> thing. But we also need some "reference vocabulary" that define classes of
> Specifications that we can map our terms to.
>
> For instance: there are different kinds of sunroofs available in the
> Renault range, depending on the model (possibly, more than one kind for a
> given model). So we have specifications such
> as "laguna:Sunroof", "twingo:Sunroof1", "twingo:Sunroof2" (Twingo and
> Laguna are 2 Renault models) - these are Renault specifications, and we
> need to use these identifiers to describe our range (for several reasons -
> including the fact that we want to state things about them!)
> What we need then are terms in a reference vocabulary that identify
> "Sunroof", but also "Electric Sunroof", "Panoramic Sunroof", etc. This
> could be a RDFS hierarchy of classes:
> :Sunroof rdfs:subclassOf :Specification .
> :ElectricSunroof rdfs:subclassOf :Sunroof.
> :ManualSunroof rdfs:subclassOf :Sunroof.
> :PanoramicSunroof rdfs:subclassOf :Sunroof.
>
> Then we (Renault) could provide:
> twingo:Sunroof1 a :ManualSunroof.
> twingo:Sunroof2 a :ElectricSunroof.
> laguna:Sunroof a :ElectricSunroof, PanoramicSunroof.
>
> We've begun to work with Makolab and some others on the definition of such
> classes of specifications.
>
>
Thanks for summing up the Spec and your ongoing work towards that.  Now I
understand much better, that this will mainly always be an internal
reference for Renault, but you need help with existing linked vocabularies
in the Automotive domain, and want to really see the work of others with
some "reference vocabulary", in order to ensure that your work is fruitful.
 Completely understand that.

As I said, many of the classes of things or "terms" that you are asking for
in an Automotive vocabulary are already described as Entities in Freebase,
and Dbpedia, etc, and many of those Entities are already linked to SKOS
through a vocabulary equivalent type in Freebase, btw... for instance, your
need for a "sunroof" class, is already there and linked to SKOS (and
through the GX vocabulary project, which was an early Google product
classification and still used internally) :
https://www.freebase.com/m/03xtqh has an equivalent SKOS Concept of
"sunroofs" https://www.freebase.com/m/0ggjrtp in the GX vocabulary scheme.

Beyond Freebase and Dbpedia, you can also search through existing linked
open vocabularies through OKFN's service :
http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/search/#s=automotive
There you have to sort of "know" what kind of classes might be related, or
might be called by some alternative label...so some discovery and intuition
is sometimes needed on LOV search to find what your really after...and
typically it is easiest to just broaden your criteria...in this case, just
the term "automotive".

Francois, once you and Renault do your internal reduction work, and provide
a data dictionary for all, then I would be happy to go through it and make
sure that Freebase has all the necessary linked entities with SKOS Concept
equivalents that you will need to produce better Schema for us as a
proposal on Schema.org and overlapped with VSO.

-- 
-Thad
Thad on Freebase.com <http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry>
Thad on LinkedIn <http://www.linkedin.com/in/thadguidry/>