This first-ever demonstration of the new zLinks plug-in shows how any existing Web document link can be automatically transformed into a portal to relevant Linked Data. Each existing link disambiguates to its contextual and relevant subject concept (SC) or named entity (NE). The SCs are grounded in the OpenCyc knowledge base, supplemented by aliases and WordNet synsets to aid disambiguation. The NEs are drawn from Wikipedia as processed via YAGO, and other online fact-based repositories. The UMBEL ontology basis to this framework offers significant further advantages. The zLinks popup is invoked only as desired via unobtrusive user interface cues.
Linked Data [
A notable catalyst to the Linked Data movement has been
DBpedia [
However, the Linked Data community readily acknowledges that the existing semantics and basis for relating compliant datasets are relatively poor. Moreover, there presently are no techniques or methods for relating non-Linked Data to the rapidly growing storehouse of LOD-compliant datasets.
The newest release of the zLinks plug-in (see Figure 1) and its supporting server-side infrastructure directly addresses the issues of improved semantics for Linked Data matching and relating Linked Data with standard Web content. Our demonstration shows how normal hyperlinks in standard WordPress blogs can be automatically related to contextually relevant Linked Data. This précis first describes the technical underpinnings to zLinks’ semantic framework, then overviews the application and possible future directions.
W-O-W-Y is the term we apply to the semantic framework for
relating a given hypertext link to its relevant Linked Data. The
term is derived from the constituent resources of WordNet2 (W),
OpenCyc3 (O), Wikipedia4 (W) and YAGO [
Subject concepts (SCs) are the core constituents to the framework.
All SCs are based on existing concepts in OpenCyc, the open
source version of the Cyc [
The named entities (NE) are drawn from Wikipedia as processed via YAGO, and other online fact-based repositories. NEs are the instances of the SC classes in the standard definition of the term5. NEs also have aliases for disambiguation purposes (such as the many ways to refer to the “United States”).
Each NE is mapped to a governing SC for ontology purposes.
All of the SCs are expressed in the UMBEL (Upper-level Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer)6 ontology. UMBEL is a lightweight structure of subject concepts and their semantic relationships. There is a direct overlap of UMBEL subject concepts to a subset of class concepts within OpenCyc. Quick relations can be determined from UMBEL for a given SC; more involved inferencing can be directed to OpenCyc. Thus, via these semantic relationships, other relations such as parent concepts, domains, various entity types, and similar relationships can be obtained once a given SC is identified.
This semantic framework is applied on the server-side once a given standard link is processed. The client-side zLinks plug-in provides the user interface, initial link extraction and results reporting to the user.
The demo is provided as a standard WordPress7 PHP plug-in, with many options parameterized.
A “snippet” of text based on a word window or sentence
surrounding the target link is extracted, parsed, filtered and then
submitted to the server for sense evaluation. We use a variant of
a graph-based disambiguation algorithm suited for use with large
knowledge lexicons [
This extraction process can also result in issued queries to standard Web search services.
The semantic result of this link evaluation – the individual zLink – is presented to the user via a subtle, small icon. The results are only presented to the user after a mouseover with set delay, to ensure the popup is purposefully desired and unobtrusive.
A popup presents the contextual zLinks results (see Figure 1), with toggle views presented as substitution overlays to preserve screen real estate. Because of the multiple relations possible, there are multiple contextual overlays. The basic results paradigm is taken from Zitgist’s related DataViewer for RDF data.8
This initial zLinks design is but a mere taste of the possibilities with Linked Data from the twin perspectives of additional relationships and presentation templates. We expect rapid developments in both areas.
A generalization of the plug-in architecture will enable extension to other user-content platforms. Still further extending this generalization to the Web browser would bring zLinks capabilities to every Internet user for all existing Web content. The basic zLinks design also lends itself to incorporating additional sources of named entity lookups and Linked Data.
Linked Data has been a triggering event in the nascent emergence of the semantic Web. We expect to see similar innovations to zLinks – such as Wikify9 – emerge to test out different paradigms and interfaces for how best to exploit a Web of Data.
An older zLinks prototype may be found at http://zlinks.zitgist.com/; an updated demo based on the version herein will be posted shortly after the presentation.