Re: UMBEL Publicly Released

Hi Mike and Fred,

> 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.

Very nice work and great to see that UMBEL is available as Linked Data and 
already interlinked with various ontologies and datasets.

> 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].

In order to allow people to browse from DBpedia into UMBEL and in order to 
give Semantic Web crawlers more starting points to crawl UMBEL and its 
interlinked datasets, it would be great to set RDF links from DBpedia into 
UMBEL.

Would it be possible that you send us the 1.5 million RDF links from UMBEL 
to DBpedia that you already got so that we can serve them together with 
DBpedia via our Linked Data interface and SPARQL endpoint?

Reading the UMBEL documentation, I noticed that you use the umbel:isLike 
property to link to DBpedia and the owl:sameAs property to link to YAGO. For 
instance:

ne:Pfizer umbel:isLike dbpedia:Pfizer
ne:Pfizer owl:sameAs yago:Pfizer

The UMBEL spec defines umbel:isLike  as

"Additionally, the property umbel:isLike can be used to state that two named 
entities "likely" have the same identity."

Why do you think that your RDF links to YAGO are more likely to be correct 
than your links into DBpedia?

As all three datasets are derived from Wikipedia and Wikipedia page 
identifiers should be present in all three datasets, I think we could use 
owl:sameAs between all three.

Keep on the great work and let's hope that UMBEL develops into an important 
interlinking hub for the Web of Data.

Cheers

Chris


> 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 Thursday, 17 July 2008 06:22:22 UTC