Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Car Repairs

Vehicle repair organizations, especially those involved in providing roadside assistance, have to be able to handle a wide range of vehicles produced by different manufacturers. Each manufacturer has its own vocabulary for describing components, faults, symptoms, etc, which is maintained in multiple languages. To search online resources to find repair information on vehicles anywhere within the European Single Market, the vocabularies used to describe different makes and models of vehicles need to be integrated. The European Commission MYCAREVENT research project brought together European vehicle manufacturers, vehicle repair organisations, diagnostic tool manufacturers and IT specialists, including Semantic Web technologists, to study how to link together the wide range of information sets they use to identify faults and repair vehicles. MYCAREVENT has shown that information sets can be integrated and accessed through a service portal by using an integrated vocabulary. The integrated vocabulary provides a ‘shared language’ for the project, a reference terminology to which the disparate terminologies of organisations participating in the project can be mapped. This lingua franca facilitates a single point of access to disparate sets of information.