Welcome

From UMBELwiki

UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) is a lightweight ontology or structure 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. These subject concepts have defined relationships between them, and can act as binding or attachment points for any Web content or data.

Connecting to the UMBEL structure thus provides context to Web data. In this manner, Web data can be linked, made interoperable, and more easily navigated and discovered.

The project Web site is at http://www.umbel.org.

UMBEL defines “subject concepts” as a distinct subset of the more broadly understood concept such as used in the SKOS RDFS controlled vocabulary or formal concept analysis or the very general concepts common to some upper ontologies. Subject concepts are a special kind of concept: ones that are concrete, subject-related and non-abstract. We further contrast these with named entities, which are the real things or instances in the world that are members of these subject concept classes.

Thus, in UMBEL parlance, there are abstract concepts, subject concepts and named entities.

The “backbone” to UMBEL is its set of 21,000 reference subject concepts. These subject concepts are derived from the OpenCyc version of the Cyc knowledge base. Each subject concept is a class to which external named entities or other ontology classes can be mapped as instances. UMBEL introduces a number of new predicates to govern these concept and entity-concept relationships.

UMBEL is completely open source and non-commercial under the Creative Commons Attribution License v. 3.0. The UMBEL ontology may be used in commercial projects without restriction.