UMBEL

For the part of a plant, see Umbel.

UMBEL, short for Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer, is an extracted subset of OpenCyc, providing the Cyc data in an RDF ontology based on SKOS and OWL 2. According to its Web site, UMBEL "is designed to help content interoperate on the Web."

Class linkages within the Linking Open Data datasets

UMBEL has two main functions:

• It is an upper ontology of about 28,000 reference concepts, designed to provide common mapping points for relating different ontologies or schema to one another, and
• A vocabulary for aiding that ontology mapping, including expressions of likelihood relationships distinct from exact identity or equivalence. This vocabulary is also designed for interoperable domain ontologies.

UMBEL is a prominent class structure used in Linked Data, along with OpenCyc, YAGO and the DBpedia ontology. Because it is a strict subset of OpenCyc concepts and relationships, mappings to UMBEL can take advantage of the reasoning engines within Cyc.

Including OpenCyc, UMBEL has about 46,000 formal mappings to DBpedia, PROTON and GeoNames, and provides linkages to more than 2 million Wikipedia pages (English version). All of its reference concepts and mappings are organized under a hierarchy of 33 different "super types", which are mostly disjoint from one another.

UMBEL was first released in July 2008. Its first production-grade and stable release was version 1.00, released in February 2011.

UMBEL is maintained by Structured Dynamics and Ontotext.

See also

• Cyc
• PROTON
• DBpedia

External links

• Main page for UMBEL
• UMBEL interactive subject concept explorer
• UMBEL specification, and its accompanying Annexes A - H
• Other UMBEL downloads and documentation
• UMBEL discussion group