Putting meaning into VW
Congratulations to William Greenly of Volkswagen and Martin Hepp of Hepp Research GmbH on superb work modelling VW product data using GoodRelations and on the publication of the Car Options Ontology.
I’ve been looking around for a new car and I can tell you first hand that the car search problem is far from solved using the web of documents. I look forward to a day when I can really search based on whatever I’m looking for in a car.
The journey began as a strategic brief about contextual search engines serving content based on context within the site and possibly across affiliate sites, a big idea that was quite quickly bound to something more tactical. That being improving site search, Greenly says. “So the objectives were about site search and improving it, but in the long-run it was always the idea to contextualize content, to facet content, to promote it in different contexts.”
From the semanticweb.com article Volkswagen: Das Auto Company is Das Semantic Web Company!
When Semantic Web people talk about improving search through context, disambiguation and faceted refinement this is exactly what they mean. Looks like VW is one to keep an eye as they develop their ideas further.
