Automotive Industry Insights

ASAM OpenXOntology

Description
The OpenX standards describe traffic participants, road networks, driving maneuvers, and test scenarios for driving and traffic simulation, labeling sensor data, and other use cases. The standards share concepts from the domain of road traffic, such as roads, lanes, and traffic participants.

OpenXOntology provides an ontology-based architecture for these concepts and thus a common definition of the domain model for the OpenX standards. OpenXOntology covers the following concepts from the domain of road traffic:

• Road infrastructure, meaning roads and lanes
• Traffic infrastructure, meaning traffic signs, signals, etc.
• Temporal changes in the road and traffic infrastructures, meaning road maintenance, diversions, etc.
• Dynamic traffic agents, such as cars, pedestrians, and cyclists
• Environment, meaning weather, time of day, etc.
• Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication objects

ASAM OpenXOntology aims to structure and formalize knowledge about the existence of things in the domain of road traffic. This is done as independently as possible of the intended applications in ASAM standard development so that the ontology can be reused for different types of applications. The current application ontologies are focusing on ODD and scenarios. Nevertheless, the Study Group Test Specification sees the need to investigate the potential benefit of a testing application ontology.

The complexity of creating and using domain-specific ontologies can be reduced by dividing knowledge into multiple areas via modularization. OpenXOntology is divided into the following modules:

• Core ontology – basic concepts such as physical objects, temporal states
• Domain ontology – central concepts of the road traffic domain
• Application ontologies – application- or standard-specific content that is not relevant to the full domain