Re: Vehicles, and customizable products

Hi Francois,

Looked through your slides.

Regarding reference of classes for configuration options.  I am thinking
that SKOS would be a way to handle this.  Freebase has some of those
classes that your referring to as well, and some are even sometimes linked
to a SKOS Concept already.  Like Diesel Fuel for instance...
https://www.freebase.com/m/0l0xy?props=&lang=en&filter=%2Fbase%2Fskosbase%2Fvocabulary_equivalent_topic&all=true

But your right, that there needs to be a domain specific vocabulary for
"Automobiles" in general.  Most of the work that you (Renault) and
Volkswagen have done, should really land in the form of better schema in
Schema.org for the sale, and maintenance of Automobiles.

The work just needs to be done.  That is, a Schema proposal for dealing
with the specific domain of "buying and selling car configurations" and the
maintenance of them.

I looked briefly at the "values", within one Spec you provide as output,
such as: http://uk.co.rplug.renault.com/speccats/BAv#var_PT1633

That Spec doesn't mean anything to me.

Can you point me to your value Spec of say "gasoline as the fuel type that
I want the engine to use" i.e. "Gasoline" such as this Freebase identifier
for the same value : https://www.freebase.com/m/05wy2

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.  Then a Schema proposal can then
begin to surface that classifies Configurator options for consumers /
buyers / dealers, etc. with the expected values used in the Automobile
industry.

(and I could certainly help to fillout the holes in Freebase for various
classifications and heirarchy where it's needed for this domain)

Thoughts ?



On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Francois-Paul Servant <
francois-paul.servant@orange.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> among the topics under discussions listed on the
> "WebSchemas/SchemaDotOrgProposals" page of the wiki, there is an item
> "Vehicles", with the mention "A proposal extending schema.org for
> describing vehicles is being prepared." I searched this list, but I only
> found one relevant thread ("Schema for vehicles"):
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2012May/0096.html
>
> Did I miss something?
>
> If there are some discussions, I could maybe contribute, as I have been
> working on a closely related subject at Renault, and we have some results
> to share. Renault publishes indeed structured data that describe its range
> of new cars. This work has been presented at ESWC 2012 [1] and at LDOW 2013
> ([2], slides [3]); to connect to the RDF data, see [4].
>
> The main contribution of this work is a domain-independent proposal for
> the description of ranges of customizable products (new cars have many
> optional features, and, this is the tricky point, there are constraints
> between the features that invalidate some of their combinations: a range of
> new cars is a "Constraint Satisfaction Problem"). The idea is simply to
> publish as data the content of the pages produced by the configurator
> applications that are used to present such ranges to human users. The
> "Configuration as Linked Data ontology" [5] provides the vocabulary for
> that. This approach is domain independent: it can be used for cars or for,
> say, computers. It allows a manufacturer to publish a description of its
> range using its own terms (an important point, for at least two reasons: it
> is simple, and features are often unique to a given manufacturer). This
> description being linked data based, and the complexity of the reasoning
> required to handle the constraints being hidden from the client, it can
> easily be crawled by agents such as search engines.
>
> It remains however that some form of shared vocabulary (or vocabulary
> alignment) is needed if one wants to develop applications that aggregate
> data from several vendors (eg. range comparators, market places): some
> shared terms are needed for, say, "Automatic gearbox" or "CO2 emission
> value" (that may not be necessary for search engines which are very
> comfortable with just text). Some work has begun on this question, with
> contributors such as Makolab, a company well aware of semantic web and of
> the automotive industry.
>
> Hope this is of interest to some of you.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> fps
>
> [1] "Product Customization as Linked Data", ESWC 2012
> http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-30284-8_47
> [2] "Describing Customizable Products on the Web of Data", LDOW 2013
> http://events.linkeddata.org/ldow2013/papers/ldow2013-paper-11.pdf
> [3] Slides, LDOW 2013
> http://fr.slideshare.net/fpservant/ldow2013
> [4] http://purl.org/configurationontology/quickstart
> [5] http://purl.org/configurationontology
>



-- 
-Thad
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