Semantic Web Company

The Linked Open Data infrastructure is in a tremendous process of maturing – the recent release of UMBEL’s webservice AND the incorporation of UMBEL classes in DBpedia are yet another confirmation of this exciting process. Knowing and having met DBpedia co-initiator, Triplify main developer and head of the AKSW research group Sören Auer and UMBEL editor and Zitgist CEO Mike Bergman in various contexts, I felt it was time to talk to and pick the brains of both these key players in a dialog situation. The (first) result is the interview you can find below. As not everyone can expected to be familiar with both projects, here is some backgrond to get you started (you can also go directly to the interview):

DBpedia has become the largest RDF repository for encyclopaedic knowledge, extracting structured information from Wikipedia and making it available on the Web of Data. UMBEL, on the other hand, provides an OpenCYC-based, light-weight ontology structure for relating Web content and data to a standard set of subject concepts, with a number of 20,000 concepts currently reached. In the Linked Data Cloud, DBpedia and UMBEL map and cross-reference each other.

In practice this means that UMBEL provides classes to describe the concepts to which “things” are members. For instance, named entities from Wikipedia such as “John F. Kennedy” are mapped with subject concepts such as Leader, Person, Administrator and Graduate, with broader and equivalent classes in CYC and FOAF and broader subject concepts within UMBEL. A link is set to Wikipedia, as well as a ‘same as’ reference to DBpedia. A class structure enables faceted browsing and extraction, inferencing, and navigation and discovery for all datasets linked to that structure.

DBpedia, in turn, returns properties of ‘John J. Kennedy’ (e.g. abstracts in available Wikipedia languages, demographic information such as birth date and place, alma mater, predecessors and successors), and ‘same as’ references, e.g., to the JFK entry in Freebase (who recently released their RDF service) and the aforementioned page in UMBEL. Furthermore, DBpedia maps the URI with available RDF types, for instance foaf:person or yago:AssassinatedAmericanPoliticians and, once again, with UMBEL’s subject concepts Person, Administrator, Graduate and Leader.

Due to its reliance on Wikipedia, DBpedia does a great job at covering a bandwidth of knowledge as broad as the spectrum of the interest of people participating in Wikipedia; it’s within the area of named entities, i.e. entities such as persons, organizations, locations, which have a proper name, but are not necessarily and specifically part of a particular, acknowledged domain or discipline. UMBEL, on the other hand, has as its most apparent advantage its reliance on OpenCyc and with that the strong inferencing and logic capabilities of the CYC knowledge-base which are thus also brought to the Web of Data. DBpedia is a community project started by the University of Leipzig, Free University Berlin and OpenLink Software, while the open and free UMBEL is developed and hosted by Zitgist with support from, again, OpenLink Software.

Now, and in particular with the recent release of Zitgist’s web service endpoints and with the incorporation of UMBEL classes in DBpedia, questions arises as to the relationship of the two projects, and regarding the role of OpenLink Software in the further process. To draw a distinction:

One could say that DBpedia’s goal is to lower the barrier for web developers and end-users in the actual use of the semantic web, while UMBEL aims at bringing “order to the chaos” that is inherent to user-generated, collective knowledge.

Would you agree with this description – and is it a contradiction at all or the kind of dynamic the Semantic Web community has been waiting for?

Mike Bergman: Yes, I would agree with this description, though we have tried many others. For example, in various writings in the past, we have described UMBEL as a roadmap, or middleware, or a backbone, or a concept ontology, or an ‘infocline’, or a meta layer for metadata, and others. Today, what I tend to use, particularly in reference to DBpedia, is the TBox-ABox distinction in computer science and description logics. UMBEL is more of a class or structural and concept relationships schema — a TBox — while DBpedia is more of an an instance and entity layer with attributes — an ABox. I think they are pretty complementary…
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News has reached me this morning that UMBEL has now been publicly released! UMBEL is a new vocabulary for the Semantic Web – I first learned about it when Andreas Blumauer returned from LinkedData Planet where he had met up with Mike Bergman from Zitgist LLC who are working on UMBEL.

Here is the release announcement Mike communicated via email yesterday:

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

Great release! They have also given us access to a media-oriented article which you can read on our portal.

The LinkedData Planet conference is over now. I had a great time here and met a lot of great and inspiring people. The exhibition area especially turned out to be THE meeting point of the conference. People from media companies, major IT-companies like IBM or from governmental and non-governmental organizations were there, meeting up with some of the most prestigious software providers and experts of the semantic web world.

And that says a lot about the semantic web both as a technology and a movement: The semantic future is made happen not behind closed doors or in some ivory tower, not thought up by some secluded genius, but by people, companies and research institutions that are as close to the heart of the web as one can be.

I learned a lot about the upcoming new release of UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) thanks to Mike Bergman (who you can see in the picture below, sporting Semantic Web Company gear). UMBEL (in the words of the project itself) has two purposes:

1) to provide a lightweight structure of subject concepts as a reference to what Web content or data “is about”;
and 2) to define a variety of binding protocols for different Web data formats to map to this “backbone.”

You might want have a look at the UMBEL subject concepts explorer provided by Mike’s Zitgist: Start exploring here, with a preset concept search for ‘Manager’.

I also learned more about the huge variety of possible applications which can be built on top of the Talis platform – thanks to Ian Davis. One example is the Lancashire Lantern WiCI – WiCI because it is a service providing Community Information.

And finally I met Richard Cyganiak in person who gave me a thorough overview of the Semantic Web index Sindice – try a search for Richard Cyganiak to see how it works (and to learn more about him, of course).

I ended up discussing possible applications using linked data with Tom Heath, Mike Bergman, Gregory Williams, Eric Hoffer (picture on top, see also his blogpost where he features the SWC “Escape from the Data Silo” logo) and Marco Neumann, both from Semantic Web Meetup NYC. It was a great evening!

Thank you, folks!

Read also pt. 1 of our conference report: LinkedData Planet in New York: A great community event for all things semantic