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Team Comment on the "VSSo: A Vehicle Signal and Attribute Ontology" Submission

W3C is pleased to receive the Vehicle Signal Specification Ontology (VSS Ontology or VSSo) submission from Institut Mines-Télécom. VSSo is an ontological representation of the GENIVI Alliance's Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS). VSSo also builds on the framework created for automobiles by the W3C Automotive Ontology Working Group published at schema.org.

VSSo follows the W3C Spatial Data on the Web Working Group's (SDWWG) Best Practices and leverages ontologies created by the SDWWG, specifically Time Ontology in OWL, Semantic Sensor Network Ontology (SSN) and contained Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) "core" ontology.

Related Work

GENIVI's Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) is a common data model for vehicle signals, data from underlying components available on the vehicle's network (eg speed, engine temperature, fuel level). The W3C Automotive Working Group exposes VSS as part of its Vehicle Information Service Specification which is already in production vehicles as well as the successor specification currently being worked on. VSS went through some recently completed, significant restructuring for a 2.0 release in collaboration with the W3C Automotive Working Group.

Leveraging VSSo to create Thing Descriptions, BMW presented a proof of concept Web of Things (WoT) demonstration at the W3C Workshop on Data Models for Transportation.

Future Work

The W3C Spatial Data on the Web Interest Group will be proposing to recharter as a Working Group again.. Among the group's intended work related to VSSo is a significant update to its Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices, deliver extensions to Time and SSN ontologies used by VSSo.

The Automotive and Transportation Business Group has been anxiously awaiting for Member Submission and intends to begin refactoring VSSo based on recently completed restructuring to underlying VSS2, utilize more modular design principles, improve tooling to keep integration in line with future VSS development and experiences to date. The Automotive Working Group will seek to recharter at the beginning of 2021 and the proposed scope will include bringing VSSo to REC track.

The Automotive and Transportation Business Group and Spatial Data on the Web Interest Group has a joint task force, the Transportation Ontology Coordination Committee. Currently it is comprised of participants from W3C, Open Geospatial Consortium, ISO SmartCities and ISO Intelligent Transportation Systems. The goal is to seek coordination on the ontological level across these standards development efforts, later broadening to include other organizations. VSSo will feature into this collaboration's catalog of ontologies.

As part of the collaboration between GENIVI and W3C, the Automotive Working Group intends to include in its draft charter Remote Procedure Calls and an accompanying Vehicle Service Catalog to be able to call named functions in addition to being able to access vehicle signals. An idea being currently discussed is for the service catalog to be represented in alternate formats to potentially support multiple protocols including creating Thing Descriptions, leveraging W3C Web of Things, and would necessitate an ontology for vehicle services to accompany this one for vehicle signals.

Disclaimer: Publication of a Member Submission by W3C does not imply endorsement by W3C, including the W3C Team or Members, nor does it guarantee that a Working Group will agree to take any specific action on a Submission.

Ted Guild <ted@w3.org>