Some UMBEL Background

UMBEL (Upper-level Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) is a lightweight reference structure for placing Web content and data in context with other data. It is comprised of about 20,000 subject concepts and their relationships — with one another and with external vocabularies and named entities.

Each UMBEL subject concept represents a defined reference for asserting what a given chunk of content is about. These fixed hubs enable similar content to be aggregated and then placed into context with other related content. These subject context hubs also provide the aggregation points for tieing in their class members, the named entities which are the people, places, events, and other specific things of the world.

The backbone to UMBEL is the relationships amongst these subject concepts. It is this backbone that provides the contextual graph for inter-relating content. UMBEL's subject concepts and their relationships are derived from the OpenCyc version of the Cyc knowledge base.

The UMBEL ontology is based on RDF and written in the RDF Schema vocabulary of SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) with some OWL Full constructs to aid interoperability.

The various services and demos provided on this site are a sandbox for where the UMBEL project is going. Next releases will soon provide as open source under attribution license:

• The formal UMBEL ontology written in OWL Full and SKOS
• Technical documentation for the ontology and its use and extension
• Freely accessible Web services according to the documentation already provided
• Technical documentation and reports for the derivation of the subject concepts from OpenCyc and the creation and extension of semsets and named entities related to that structure.

UMBEL's backbone is also a reference structure for more specific domains or ontologies, thereby enabling further context for inter-relating additional content. Much of the sandbox shows these external relationships.

To learn more, go to the UMBEL project Web site.