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Automotive Ontology Community Group

The Automotive Ontology Working Group is an informal group of individuals and corporations who want 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. In particular, we want to develop extension proposals for schema.org so that automotive information can be better understood by search engines and OWL Web ontologies for the automotive industry. Also, we want to provide a forum for bringing together researchers and practitioners who are working on advancing the field.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

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Documentation of our extension is now publically available

I’m happy to inform you that finally our extension documentation “Markup for Autos” has  been published on the schema.org site: https://schema.org/docs/automotive.html.

We are sure that it will help us and our clients in adding the advanced markup to their automotive sites and will make them much better visible to both search engines and other agents.

Mirek

Toyota Motor Europe use of schema.org and auto.schema.org vocabularies

Toyota Motor Europe (TME), led in the area of Semantic SEO by MakoLab SA and Hepp Research GmbH, has implemented elements of schema.org core and auto.schema.org extension vocabularies in their websites across Europe.

The scope of the vocabularies use

In particular, TME’s Models and Specification Pages (e.g. Spec1 , Spec2) and Grades Details Pages (e.g. Grade1, Grade2) contain schema.org markup with types and properties from both core of schema.org and the automotive extension. In some other pages (like the main car pages (e.g. Main1, Main2) there is schema.org markup targeting the display of Google Rich Snippets (price/reviews).

As an example of the use, let us see the use of the type EngineSpecification and the properties: vehicleEngine and vehicleConfigurationin the following construct:

(…)
   "@type": [ "Car", "ProductModel"],
    "name": "Toyota AYGO x Hatchback 5-dørs 1.0 VVT-i (69 hk) 5-trins manuelt",
    "description": " ",
    "image": "https://images.toyota-europe.com/dk/ag/width/1200/exterior-right-front.jpg",
    "vehicleConfiguration": "AYGO 5-dørs hatchback 1.0 VVT-i x",
    "vehicleEngine": {
                       "@type": "EngineSpecification",
                       "name": "1.0 VVT-i (69 hk)"
                     },
(…)

While the use of auto.schema.org seems to be quite modest in its scope, the size of the set of URLs that contain elements of the markup is impressive: our post-implementation assessment shows that objects of type Car are in almost 7000 URLs from the entire TME web landscape – already indexed by Google!

What are the effects of the markup?

So far, the fundamental effect of the markup will be to feed Google’s Knowledge Graph. For example, we can already see that Google is looking for this data as per example of the Knowledge Panel:

It is expected and highly anticipated, that the manufacturer’s websites with Schema.org markup will be very trustworthy source of information for Google, and the data in the Knowledge Panel will be coming from this source.

However, as the life of the markup has just started, we suspect that the data marked up with Schema might be used for example in Tabular Search Results or so called “Direct Answers”:

Today we can see that the data comes from various websites’ content (for example from Wikipedia, manufacturer’s websites and other), but we suspect they might be soon based to a higher extent on the most reliable data which is the structured markup embedded into the pages of the manufacturer website.

It also worth noticing that the use of schema.org in the TME pages brings Google Rich Snippets to life:

Conclusion

Despite using a small part of the schema.org and automotive extension vocabularies in the TME websites the early results are quite promising and show the impact of the schema.org markup on the Customer Search Experience related to the manufacturer.

“Markup for Autos” – the documentation for auto.schema.org extension

Dear All,

I’m happy to inform you that we have created a documentation for our extension. The document entitled “Markup for Autos” is available for review or comments at:

http://sdo-auto-fix.appspot.com/docs/automotive.html

The “shape” and the content of the document was inspired by similar documents placed on the schema.org site “Documentation” section in general, and on the “Markup for Banks and Financial Institutions” document in particular.

We would be very happy if you could visit the new doc and if you had any comments, requests for changes or remarks, to write them as comments here or at the respective Github Issue: https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/1677

We are working with schema.org team to have this document published on the production schema.org site.

Cheers
Mirek

The call details …

9 AM PDT (California), 12 PM EDT (New York), 6 PM CET (Paris) time.

GoTo Meeting:

https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/822884949

 2.  Use your microphone and speakers (VoIP) – a headset is recommended.  Or, call in using your telephone.

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Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting

 Meeting ID: 822-884-949

Agenda for tomorrow’s call

Dear All,

The main theme of our call has not changed and is:

How to accelerate the adoption of auto.schema.org in the Automotive Industry Digital Platforms

However, after some discussions I had with some people, I propose to modify a bit the agenda (Point 5):

  1. The status of schema.org and automotive schema.org extensions
  2. Key message – building TRUST of clients in automotive DATA through auto.schema.org
  3. Plan for the adoption of auto.schema.org to automotive Digital Platforms:

    1. Implementation guidelines
    2. Consulting services
    3. Post-implementation follow-ups
  4. Additional quick benefits from auto.schema.org data consumption:

    1. New kind of analytics – presentation of a POC with GA
    2. Enhanced search over the data space for automotive websites – the presentation of the idea
  5. Future extension of auto.schema.org terms – first draft (see our Wiki at: https://www.w3.org/community/gao/wiki/Main_Page)
  6. Discussion

“See” you all tomorrow at:

9 AM PDT (California), 12 PM EDT (New York), 6 PM CET (Paris) time.

GTM link is here: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/822884949

Mirek

Agenda for the Community Conference Call

The call main theme:
How to accelerate the adoption of auto.schema.org in the Automotive Industry Digital Platforms

  1. The status of schema.org and automotive schema.org extensions
  2. Key message – building TRUST of clients in automotive DATA through auto.schema.org
  3. Plan for the adoption of auto.schema.org to automotive Digital Platforms:

    1. Implementation guidelines
    2. Consulting services
    3. Post-implementation follow-ups
  4. Additional quick benefits from auto.schema.org data consumption:

    1. New kind of analytics – presentation of a POC with GA
    2. Enhanced search over the data space for automotive websites – the presentation of the idea
  5. Future of GAO Ontology – new ideas 
  6. Discussion

 Estimated Time – 90 minutes