Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

In Italy, Quattroruote is a leading online magazine for car aficionados and buyers, with its reputation built on testing and evaluating models and its own blue book-like price estimates for vehicles. Now it’s a leading-edge user of semantic web technology, too.

It has deployed Expert System’s Cogito semantic solution to help add value to user searches for used cars in its portal to the world of classified car sales.

“Semantic tools are extremely beneficial to being able to properly understand classified ads and categorize them correctly and accurately,” says Luigi Conti, director of publisher Editoriale Domus. “Semantic capabilities ease the way people interact with our search engine, and we want the search experience to be as easy as asking a question to a live person.”

The company has a marketplace where it offers traditional search services, but its semantically powered CheAuto “is a completely different story,” he says. CheAuto’s mission, Conti says, is to provide users a unique point of search for used car classified ads, adding two elements to the search results.

First, the amount the seller is looking to spend is compared with what Quattroruote deems to be the official value of the used car, when possible.” In Italy, the Quattroruote Used Car Value is a quasi-standard de facto,” he notes.

Second, all of the different classified ads are categorized and ordered according to Quattroruote Infocar, a database of all the cars (make, model, and so on) sold in Italy since 1980.

“CheAuto is a meta search engine that allows users to search not only within one marketplace, but within many of them, ultimately having insight into every significant marketplace in Italy,” Conti says.

Users can include all of their requirements in one sentence, asking for all the relevant criteria, even those not pre-defined as metadata, to help them in their decision-making process. The semantic engine interprets the users’ questions and provides precise and correct information. The ability to understand the meaning of words and the logical structure of phrases plays a fundamental role, says Luca Scagliarini, VP strategic and business development at Expert System (see article): “Only through semantics is it possible to understand that ‘I’m looking for a 2000 Alfa 147′ is different from ‘I’m looking for an Alfa 147 2000,’ because in the first case, 2000 indicates the model year and the second case indicates engine volume. Precision and recall are higher because the system extracts all of the relevant ads, giving the user precise answers,” he says.

Conti’s decision to tap Expert System for the project came after evaluating other options and concluding the vendor had the competence and clear understanding of its specific industry to move forward. One of the problems the technology has to help Quattroruote address is the fact that source data remains unstable. “It’s often changing and scattered across platforms; therefore, a semantic tool is the pillar of the service,” Conti says. The service’s performance is based on the integration between a semantic crawling module and a feed processor, an engine for linguistic and semantic analysis and a matching module, according to Scagliarini.

“Some of the used car sales ads come from feeds already organized based on a predefined XML scheme, and additional ads are extracted from other open sources,” he says. The latter consists of non-structured text, which is processed by the system and then channeled together with the structured data into a single database, from which the users’ answers are then extrapolated.

The CheAuto service was launched in April, to excellent feedback from users, Conti says. Expert System worked with Quattroruote to integrate its software with the site’s pre-existing architecture, says Scagliarini. It’s currently utilizing standard dual-core servers.

“We are thinking about strengthening the infrastructure by upgrading the hardware, in order to maintain the semantic engine’s performance standard at a constantly high level,” he says. “We are expecting a widespread use of the system, given the positive feedback from the first users and, due to the increase in sources containing sales ads. On average, there are presently 37,993 ads/day, and we are also expecting heavier traffic.”

Quattroruote has not monetized the service yet, keeping its focus on enhancing the offering for now. But it has high hopes for the service’s impact on its well-established brand. “Quattroruote has an incredible brand in Italy, and offering this service helps us by empowering and enriching that brand and its value proposition,” he says. “When you need an authoritative point of view on the automotive world, you turn to Quattroruote. Having a tool like Cogito on the back end, the brand itself receives a strong confirmation of its values.”

Quattroruote also has a separate project underway with Expert System, using its semantic platform to provide auto companies with information gleaned from users’ comments.

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