About the

Finder: Subject Concept Web Service

The Finder: Subject Concept Web service is used to find UMBEL subject concepts that match a search string. This is the primary tool for finding available subject concepts.

Each UMBEL subject concept has two different kind of labels:

• The internal label referring to the Subject Concept — this label always is mixed case and has no blank spaces. For example, the internal label for the subject concept " United States President" is UnitedStatesPresident
• The labels composing the semset (aliases, synonyms, etc.) labels — these are the alternate labels (and there may be many!) for the subject concept with a wide variety of conventions and capitalizations. These are the variety of labels that might be encountered in general reading. For example, for the subject concept UnitedStatesPresident, the semset labels include: United States president, U.S. president, U.S. presidents, US president, US presidents, United States chief executives, United States chief executive, United States presidents, ex-president, ex-presidents, president of America, president of the US, etc.

There are three ways to use this Web service to query these different labels:

• Search within all labels — by selecting this option, you search both kinds of labels (case 1 & 2 & 3)
• Search for the subject concept URI only — by selecting this option, you search the subject concept URI string only (case 1)
• Search for the subject concept preferred label only — by selecting this option, you search the subject concept preferred label only (case 2)
• Search for the subject concept alternative labels only — by selecting this option, you search the subject concept alternative labels only (semset labels) (case 3).

Searches using this Web service are not case sensitive (other UMBEL Web services may be).