The Automotive Ontology (AUTO)
The Automotive Ontology (AUTO) defines the shared conceptual structures in the automotive industry. It is an OWL ontology. It is built upon the auto schema.org extension created by the W3C Automotive Ontology Community Group and it refers to the essential real-world objects related to popular vehicles like cars, buses (coaches), and motorcycles.
The AUTO ontology is a part of the Data Innovation Lab initiatives of EDM Council.
The auto schema.org extension authors were motivated by the principles of simplicity and practicality. ‘Simplicity’ led to an extremely small set of terms, resulting in a lean ontology, whilst ‘practicality’ limited the scope of terms to reflect the most important objects, as seen from the automotive market perspective. The principle of ‘Occam’s Razor’ dictated the focus on terms, reflecting general consumer preferences observed from the perspective of their searches and typical digital activities related to automobiles. Thanks to such an approach, the ontology has immediate application for the vehicle description in the car makers’ and the dealers’ websites, informational and e-commerce alike.
However, this is just a beginning. It is our intention to develop it into truly foundational ontology for the automotive industry, that can help in the creation of Knowledge Graphs, can add power to the Machine Learning algorithms and much more.
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The Automotive Ontology Working Group runs in the environment of W3C
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The Automotive Ontology Working Group runs as a W3C Community and Business Group. It is an informal group of individuals and corporations who work hard 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. So far, the community has helped to develop the automotive extension for schema.org (https://auto.schema.org/ ) so that automotive information is better understood by search engines.
While the activity related to the future development of the Automotive Ontology is endorsed and supported by EDM Council, the community remains in the W3C environment as the appreciation of its foundational role in the Open Data community. The Automotive Ontology development space is organized on the EDM Council AUTO github space.