[uf-discuss] [ANN] UMBEL Subject Reference Project

[Michael K. Bergman]

Hi All,

You are cordially invited to comment or participate in the UMBEL (Upper 
Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) project.

UMBEL is a lightweight way to describe the subject(s) of Web content, 
akin to the relationship "isAbout". It is meant to work universally with 
HTML, tagging, microformats or other standard practices, including 
various RDF schemas and more formal ontologies.  Its reference subject 
'backbone' is derived from the intersection of common subjects found on 
popularly used Web sites and other accepted subject references.

UMBEL is very simple with few ambitions.  It is merely a reference 'bag 
of subjects' to help relate Web data sets to one another.

UMBEL makes no presumptions to replace formal domain or upper 
ontologies, has little or no inferential power, and makes no assumptions 
about the means to describe or serialize the underlying data.  UMBEL is 
meant to work with data sets ranging from RSS and Atom feeds to tagging, 
microformats, RDF, existing schema and other data and metadata models. 
UMBEL's development is being backed by a number of leading open data 
efforts and entities.

In addition to its core reference subjects, the UMBEL project will be 
providing look up, query, registration, pinging, and related services. 
The project is completely open under a community process with all 
products available via Creative Commons licenses.

The initial project site is at http://www.umbel.org, including an 
introduction (http://www.umbel.org/intro.xhtml) (the best place to 
start!) and the draft project specification 
(http://www.umbel.org/proposal.xhtml).

A mailing list you can monitor or join is at 
http://groups.google.com/group/umbel-ontology.

We welcome and invite your participation!

Best regards,

Mike Bergman

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Please accept apologies in advance if you receive duplicate 
announcements; this was posted to a few appropriate mailing lists.

In future, all announcements will be made directly from the UMBEL Web site.
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http://www.umbel.org
mailto:mike at mkbergman.com
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