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.
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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 (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.
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!
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:
