UMBEL Services, Part 1: Overview
From the post:
UMBEL, the Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer, is an upper ontology of about 28,000 reference concepts and a vocabulary designed for domain ontologies and ontology mapping [1]. When we first released UMBEL in mid-2008 it was accompanied by a number of Web services and a SPARQL endpoint, and general APIs. In fact, these were the first Web services developed for release by Structured Dynamics. They were the prototypes for what later became the structWSF Web services framework, which incorporated many lessons learned and better practices.
By the time that the structWSF framework had evolved with many additions to comprise the Open Semantic Framework (OSF), those original UMBEL Web services had become quite dated. Thus, upon the last major update to UMBEL to version 1.0 back in February of this year, we removed these dated services.
Like what I earlier mentioned about the cobbler’s children being the last to get new shoes, it has taken us a bit to upgrade the UMBEL services. However, I am pleased to announce we have now completed the transition of UMBEL’s earlier services to use the OSF framework, and specifically the structWSF platform-independent services. As a result, there are both upgraded existing services and some exciting new ones. We will now be using UMBEL as one of our showcases for these expanding OSF features. We will be elaborating upon these features throughout this series, some parts of which will appear on Fred Giasson’s blog.
In this first part, we provide a broad overview of the new UMBEL OSF implementation. We also begin to foretell some of the parts to come that will describe some of these features in more detail.
There are three more parts that follow this one.
If you have the time, I am interested in your take on this resource.
A lot of time and effort has gone into making this a useful site, so what parts do you like best/least? What would you change?
More to follow on this one.