Re: Vehicles, and customizable products

Hi all,
for the automotive segment, I strongly recommend integrating

	http://www.heppnetz.de/ontologies/vso/ns

into schema.org.

It is a GoodRelations extension for all kinds of vehicles and will thus nicely fit to the already existing GoodRelations elements in schema.org.

Exposing configuration information can basically be done in two ways:

1. Exposing the *rules* for compatibility of components; that is what Volkswagen does with their COO ontology,

    http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/vocabularies/coo/ns.html

2. Exposing (a subset of) actually buildable cars or partly configured cars; this is what can be done with basic schema.org/GoodRelations/VSO elements, plus maybe the conceptual modeling work done at Renault.

For Web markup, I recommend the second route, but it will not require more than just translating the VSO ontology into a schema.org extension proposal, and I will tackle that as soon as my resources permit.

See the comprehensive examples of what the VSO allows with just 28 new types, of which 14 could be covered by external www.productontology.org types, so one would only need:

vso:Automobile
vso:BodyStyleValue
vso:DriveWheelConfigurationValue
vso:EmissionStandardValue
vso:EngineTypeValue
vso:FeatureValue
vso:FuelQuantity
vso:FuelTypeValue
vso:MotorizedRoadVehicle
vso:SpeedInterval
vso:SteeringPositionValue
vso:TransmissionTypeValue
vso:Vehicle
vso:Watercraft

And one could immediately cover the following very granular scenarios:

1. Car Sales

Scenario: Miller Inc. sells the following car:

	• Make and Model: 2002 Chevrolet Camaro
	• Price: $ 11990
	• VIN: 2G1FP22G522155049
	• Drivetype: RWD
	• Mileage: 42000
	• Stock No: 155049
	• Transmission: 6-Speed Manual
	• Engine: 5.7L V8 OHV 16V
	• Exterior Color: red
Turtle:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#Turtle.

RDFa:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#RDFa.

2. Car Rental

Scenario: Miller Inc. offers the following car class for rent. 

	• ACRISS Car Classification Code "ECMN" (a typical code for rental car categories), i.e. an Economy car, 2/4 doors, manual gearbox, no air-conditioning (e.g. Ford Fiesta or Opel Corsa)
	• The price is $ 50 per day.
Turtle:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#Turtle_2.

RDFa:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#RDFa_2.

3. Bike Rental

Scenario: Miller Inc. offers bikes for rent. The rate is 10 $ per day.

Turtle:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#Turtle_3.

RDFa:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#RDFa_3.

4. Canoe Rental

Scenario: Miller Inc. offers canoes for 2 - 3 paddlers for rent. The rate is 10 $ per day.

Turtle:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#Turtle_4.

RDFa:
See http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/VSO#RDFa_4.

and much more.

Martin




On Jul 26, 2013, at 12:52 AM, Thad Guidry wrote:

> 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
> Thad on Freebase.com
> Thad on LinkedIn

--------------------------------------------------------
martin hepp
e-business & web science research group
universitaet der bundeswehr muenchen

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Received on Friday, 26 July 2013 08:04:49 UTC