ANN: UMBEL Publicly Released

Hi All,

As its editors and on behalf of our sponsors and contributors, 
Fred Giasson 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], 
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 [3] and DBpedia [4]. 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 5].  All subject concepts and named 
entities are available as Linked Data [see 5].  Five volumes of 
documentation [5] are also available.

The release is accompanied by about a dozen Web services [6] for 
using or manipulating UMBEL, along with a new introductory slide 
show [7].

Additional release information may be found on Fred's [8] or my 
[9] separate blog postings.

We welcome those with interest or suggestions for improvements to 
do so through the UMBEL discussion forum [10].  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, Mike


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

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2008 20:33:58 UTC