Umbel

An umbel is an inflorescence which consists of a number of short flower stalks (called pedicels) which spread from a common point, somewhat like umbrella ribs. The word was coined in botany in the 1590s, from Latin umbella "parasol, sunshade." The arrangement can vary from being flat topped to almost spherical. Umbels can be simple or compound. The secondary umbels of compound umbels are known as umbellules or umbellets. A small umbel is called an umbellule. The arrangement of the inflorescence in umbels is referred to as umbellate, or occasionally subumbellate (almost umbellate).

Umbels are a characteristic of plants such as carrot, parsley, dill, and fennel in the family Apiaceae; ivy, aralia and fatsia in the family Araliaceae; and onion (Allium) in the family Alliaceae.

An umbel is a type of indeterminate inflorescence. A compressed cyme, which is a determinate inflorescence, is called umbelliform if it resembles an umbel.

Gallery

Compound umbel of a hemlock-parsley, Conioselinum pacificum (Apiaceae)

UMBEL

UMBEL (Upper Mapping and Binding Exchange Layer) is a logically organized knowledge graph of 35,000 concepts and entity types that can be used in information science for relating information from disparate sources to one another. The grounding of this information occurs by common reference to the permanent URIs for the UMBEL concepts; the connections within the UMBEL upper ontology enable concepts from sources at different levels of abstraction or specificity to be logically related. Since UMBEL is an open source extract of the OpenCyc knowledge base, it can also take advantage of the reasoning capabilities within Cyc.

UMBEL has two means to promote the semantic interoperability of information:. It is: