ANN: UMBEL Publicly Released

Hi All,

As its editors and on behalf of our sponsors and contributors, Mike 
Bergman and I would like to announce the public availability of UMBEL.

UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) [1] is a lightweight 
ontology for relating Web content and data to a standard set of 20,000 
subject concepts. Based on OpenCyc [2] with a core reliance on the SKOS 
vocabulary [3], these subject concepts have defined relationships 
between them, and can act as semantic binding nodes for any data or Web 
content. A further 1.5 million named entities have been extracted from 
Wikipedia and mapped to the UMBEL reference structure with cross-links 
to YAGO [4] and DBpedia [5]. The system can easily be extended with 
additional dictionaries of named entities, including ones specific to 
enterprises or domains.

UMBEL is provided as open source under the Creative Commons 3.0 
Attribution-Share Alike license. The complete ontology with all subject 
concepts, definitions, terms and relationships can be freely downloaded 
[see 6].  All subject concepts and named entities are available as 
Linked Data [see 6, 7].  Five volumes of documentation [6] are also 
available.

The release is accompanied by about a dozen Web services [8] for using 
or manipulating UMBEL, along with a new introductory slide show [9].  

Additional release information may be found on my [10] or Mike's [11] 
separate blog postings.

We welcome those with interest or suggestions for improvements to do so 
through the UMBEL discussion forum [12].  We will shortly be putting 
easier services online for such input.

So, enjoy!  We look forward to your commentary, suggestions and putting 
UMBEL under production-grade stress.  We know will be doing the same!

Regards, Frederick Giasson


[1]  http://www.umbel.org/
[2]  http://www.opencyc.org
[3]  http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/
[4]  http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~suchanek/downloads/yago/
[5]  http://dbpedia.org
[6]  http://www.umbel.org/documentation.html
[7]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data
[8]  http://umbel.zitgist.com/
[9]  http://www.slideshare.net/mkbergman/
[10] 
http://fgiasson.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/16/starting-to-play-with-the-umbel-ontology/
[11] http://www.mkbergman.com/?p=449
[12] http://groups.google.com/group/umbel-ontology/

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2008 21:57:23 UTC