Format

Cardealer DP (Car Dealer Data Package) is a data exchange format that helps car dealerships share their car listings. It is developed on top of the Data Package standard.

Why Cardealer DP?

The automotive industry lacks a standardized format for exchanging car listing data between dealerships, marketplaces, and aggregation platforms. This creates several challenges:

• Data inconsistency: Each platform uses its own proprietary format, making integration difficult
• Manual data entry: Dealerships often need to manually enter the same car listings across multiple platforms
• Limited interoperability: Aggregators must maintain custom integrations for each data source
• Data quality issues: Without clear schemas, data validation and quality control are challenging

Cardealer DP solves these problems by providing a standardized, validated, and extensible format for sharing car dealership data. Built on the proven Data Package standard, it ensures data is machine-readable, well-documented, and easy to integrate.

Structure of a Cardealer DP File

A Cardealer DP file is a JSON document that follows the Data Package specification. The file contains metadata about the package and one or more data resources describing the dealer, its showrooms, and its cars.

Basic Structure

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datisthq/cardealerdp/<version>/extension/profile.json",
  "resources": [
    {
      "name": "car",
      "schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datisthq/cardealerdp/<version>/extension/schemas/car.json",
      "data": [{...}, {...}, {...}]
    },
    {
      "name": "dealer",
      "schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datisthq/cardealerdp/<version>/extension/schemas/dealer.json",
      "data": [{...}]
    },
    {
      "name": "showroom",
      "schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datisthq/cardealerdp/<version>/extension/schemas/showroom.json",
      "data": [{...}, {...}]
    }
  ]
}

Key Components

1. Profile: References the Cardealer DP profile that defines the structure and validation rules
2. Resources: An array containing 1-3 resources:
   • dealer (required): Information about the car dealership (exactly 1 item)
   • car (optional): Array of car listings offered by the dealer
   • showroom (optional): Array of physical showroom locations

Each resource includes:

• name: The resource type identifier ("dealer", "car", or "showroom")
• schema: URL pointing to the JSON schema that validates the data structure
• data: An array of data items conforming to the schema

Data Relationships

The resources are connected through foreign keys:

• Cars can reference a specific showroom via showroomId
• If no showroomId is provided, the car is assumed to be at the dealer’s main address
• Each showroom belongs to a dealer

This structure allows flexible representation of dealerships with single or multiple locations while maintaining data integrity through schema validation.