An Ontology Supporting On-Board Vehicle Multimodal Interaction System

This chapter introduces a modular ontology supporting an on-board vehichle multimodal interaction system. Such a system is aimed at making road transport more efficient and effective, safer, and more environmentally friendly. The role of the ontology is that of enabling semantic interoperability in order to allow cooperation between the road infrastructure and assisting the driver to perform certain traffic related actions also increasing the infrastructure efficiency. In particular, the project is engaged in the development of applications such as intelligent speed adaptation, including static (new roads, speed limits changed by authorities), temporary (road works, schools), and dynamic (traffic responsive, road and/or weather conditions) speed limits and cooperative early information that is shared in (almost) real time among vehicles and infrastructures in critical conditions. The chapter sketches out the main issues related to ontologies and emphasize the relevance of top-level (i.e., domain independent or foundational) ontologies in order to integrate different domain models. We define five domain ontologies for the purpose of the system: Vehicle Security, Road and Traffic Security, Meteorological, Users' Profiles,and Travel. The last one reports concepts concerning a given travel (departure, destination, vehicle, road) and imports concepts from the other ones. We emphasize the role of ontologies in enabling semantic interoperabilty in such an intensive knowledge-processing contexts.