CAOVA: A Car Accident Ontology for VANETs

In a near future, vehicles will be provided with a variety of new sensors capable of gathering information from their surroundings. These vehicles will also be capable of sharing the harvested information via Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) with nearby vehicles, or with the emergency services in case of an accident. Hence, distributed applications based on VANETs will need to agree on a `common understanding´ of context for interoperability, and therefore, it is necessary to create a standard structure which enables data interoperability among all the different entities involved in transportation systems. In this paper, we focus on traffic safety; specifically, we present a Car Accident lightweight Ontology for VANETs (CAOVA). The instances of our ontology are filled with: (i) the information collected when an accident occurs, and (ii) the data available in the General Estimates System (GES) accidents database. We assess the reliability of our proposal in two different ways: one via realistic crash tests, and the other one using a network simulation framework.