About the

Subject Concept Explorer Web Service

The Subject Concept Explorer service is a visualization interface that lets you browse the UMBEL graph of subject concept relationships. You can navigate from one node to another by clicking any of the circles. Each circle is an UMBEL subject concept or an external ontology class.

When a node if selected, its concept description is displayed in the right sidebar of the interface.

Note there are four different kinds of relationship between the concepts:

• Blue (B). (concept A) --- broader than --> (Concept B). concept A is more general than concept B
• Red (N). (concept A) --- narrower than --> (Concept B). concept A is more specific than concept B
• Green (=). (concept A) --- equivalent to --> (Concept B). concept A is equivalent to concept B
• Mauve (I). (concept A) --- is a --> (Concept B). concept A is an instance of the concept B

As each node is selected, the display refreshes and shows the new set of relationships for the current node (subject concept or external class). Note the dropdown list shown at the upper right of the display enables you to return to previous views or steps.

There are two ways to refer or retrieve an UMBEL subject concept when dealing with this Web service. In UMBEL, all subject concepts have a unique identifier called a URI. For example, the URI of the subject concept Project is: http://umbel.org/ns/sc/Project. This unique URI provides an unambiguous identifier for the concept and one that can be used for Web access and retrieval. This longer form is what must be used when processing internally by machine.

However, for convenience and ease-of-use for the Web service, you can remove the leading part of the URI " http://umbel.org/ns/sc/" to check for Subject Concept Reports or to get lists of sub- or super-concepts, or whatever. Note, though, the entire URI of each UMBEL subject concept is returned in the results set by this Web service (and not its abbreviation).

Thus, to invoke a report, you may specify the string "http://umbel.org/ns/sc/Project" or the string "Project" to refer to the same UMBEL subject concept.