A Semantic Knowledge Graph Construction Pipeline for Vehicle Intention Prediction in nuScenes

Overview & Synopsis

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly used in autonomous driving (AD) to make traffic scene entities and relations explicit for prediction and reasoning. Existing traffic-scene KGs, however, primarily emphasize trajectory forecasting or general scene understanding. This paper presents the nuScenes Intention Knowledge Graph (NIKG), a focused Web Ontology Language (OWL)-based semantic representation and construction pipeline for ego-centric vehicle intention context. NIKG instantiates nuScenes scenes as a self-describing Turtle graph and promotes three intention-relevant relations to first-class properties of each scene participant: ego-relative motion, spatial configuration, and time to collision (TTC) risk. The pipeline uses a small input contract available in many ego-centric driving datasets: ego pose, tracked object annotations, and temporal keyframe order. NIKG is released as an ontology-backed, self-describing graph artifact together with a reproducible construction pipeline and validation protocol for ego-centric intention context. Applying this pipeline to nuScenes mini yields a graph of 211,335 triples across 404 keyframes; under the validation protocol, ego-relative motion labels achieve 92.5% forward consistency. Coverage, semantic consistency, and temporal coherence analyses over this artifact are further reported. NIKG occupies the space between scene-oriented traffic KGs and intention-prediction models: a small, explicit semantic layer intended to support downstream work such as knowledge graph embedding (KGE), SPARQL-based feature extraction, or hybrid neuro-symbolic reasoning.