Potpourri

Knowledge Bases

UMBEL is a reference ontology, which contains 28,000 concepts (classes and relationships) derived from the Cyc knowledge base. The reference concepts of UMBEL are mapped to Wikipedia, DBpedia ontology classes, GeoNames and PROTON.

These mappings mean that existing knowledge bases may be brought to bear to define, clarify relationships and help infer meanings for any information related via UMBEL.

The gold standard of these mappings is via Wikipedia. Across all mappings, 60% of all UMBEL reference concepts (or 16,884) are now linked directly to Wikipedia via the new umbel:correspondsTo property.

See further the article, "In Search of ‘Gold Standards’ for the Semantic Web."

Data Capture

This is a new initiative by Structured Dynamics. Stay tuned for further information.

Distributed Knowledge

The structWSF Web services framework is designed explicitly to support interoperability of distributed information and knowledge bases. Each structWSF installation has its own URI address. In turn, each dataset hosted on any given structWSF instance also has a unique address.

Owners of structWSF installations and datasets may grant others a variety of access and CRUD (create - read - update - delete) rights or not to instances and datasets and any combinations thereof. This means remote users may access, query and manipulate local information if appropriate rights have been granted.

In this manner, a structWSF instance may act either as an access point, a hub or a gateway for Web-accessible information. Any server or location of a structWSF instance may thus be part of a collaborative information community.

For more on these capabilities, see further "Distributed Networks with structWSF."