UMBEL: A new fixed star in the global knowledge space!
17.07.2008
EXCLUSIVE: UMBEL, a new vocabulary for the Semantic Web released in July 2008 by Zitgist and parters, servse as a coherent reference structure of subject concept classes for a more powerful Semantic Web.
A Map of Interstate Highways for the Semantic Web
UMBEL is a new vocabulary for the Semantic Web which was released in July 2008 by Zitgist and its partners. The Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer is an ontology for relating Web content and data to a standard set of subject concepts. Its purpose is to provide a fixed set of reference points in a global knowledge space. "UMBEL is like a map of an interstate highway system, a set of roadsigns to help find related content and a way of getting from one big place to another. Once in the right vicinity, other ontologies — more akin to detailed street maps — are then necessary to get to specific locations or street addresses", states Michael Bergman, a co-editor of UMBEL and CEO of Zitgist LLC.
To understand the role of UMBEL in the Semantic Web, different metaphors can serve:
- A road map — an interconnected map of 20,000 subject concepts that provide the reference signposts to place information in context and in relation to other data
- A backbone — 20,000 solidly connected nodes to which the real things of the world ("named entities") and other external ontologies and distributed datasets can be bound or attached
- Middleware — an API between the integral OpenCyc knowledge base from which UMBEL's subject concepts and relationships are derived and external Web data and structures
- An infocline — a transition layer between the closed world of Cyc with its strong inferencing and logic capabilities and the open world of Web data and RDF
- Linked Data in context — fully exposed as Linked Data to provide a conceptual graph for other Linked Data to relate and interconnect, and
- A lightweight ontology — a fully specified RDF vocabulary based mostly on SKOS but with OWL and other RDFS aspects for complete interoperability with the Semantic Web.
Capturing the Common Sense Relationships of the World
UMBEL's subject concepts and their relationships are a derived subset of the Cyc knowledge base and its open-source version, OpenCyc. Cyc has been developed over 20 years through more than 1,000 person-years of effort to capture the common sense relationships of the world. "The UMBEL project and its need to capture the 'open world' aspects of the Web has brought a fresh perspective and set of challenges to Cyc," said Michael Witbrock, VP of Research at Cycorp. "We are excited and committed to support UMBEL as part of our overall Web relevance strategy," he added.
Kingsley Idehen, CEO and President of OpenLink Software and sponsor of the UMBEL initiative adds: "Nearly two years ago we co-founded the DBpedia project to expose RDF-based Linked Data from Wikipedia and many other sources; with UMBEL, we now have a complementary space in the Linked Data realm that delivers contextual linkage between named entities and subject matter concepts."
Whilst UMBEL is based on a "faithful but reduced" subset extraction of concepts and relationships from the OpenCyc version of the Cyc knowledge, UMBEL vocabulary also defines some important new predicates and leverages existing semantic Web standards. The ontology is provided as Linked Data with Web services access (and a pending SPARQL endpoint). The UMBEL Subject Concepts Explorer (start exploring along the concept "ontology") provides a graphical user interface. UMBEL is provided as open source under the Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike license; the complete ontology can be freely downloaded.
This 0.70 release is the first one in which the UMBEL subject concepts and ontology will be applied as a real vocabulary in public settings. Some areas are known to be weaker and less complete than others. Input mechanisms are being put in place for user feedback to supplement the project's discussion forum and mailing list. The project anticipates updates based on this feedback in the coming months.
References
UMBEL - Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer