an open-source upper ontology

gist is an upper-level ontology containing a minimal set of concepts required for most business applications. It has been developed and maintained by Semantic Arts since 2012.

gist represents the fundamental concepts and relationships that exist for most business use cases and is specifically designed to be domain independent. This flexibility allows gist to be applied to a wide spectrum of domains and facilitates both interoperability and integration of knowledge. We have designed gist for clarity and completeness to cover nearly all the concepts that exist in real-world ontology development.

gist represents the fundamental concepts and relationships that exist for most business use cases and is specifically designed to be domain independent. This flexibility allows gist to be applied to a wide spectrum of domains and facilitates both interoperability and integration of knowledge. We have designed gist for clarity and completeness to cover nearly all the concepts that exist in real-world ontology development.

The gist ontology is FREE to use and is distributed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-ShareAlike license. You can use it as you see fit for any purpose, as long as you give us attribution and keep it in the gist namespace.

The gist ontology consists of just over 135 classes and about 140 properties and serves as a foundation for building more specialized ontologies. We have culled out highly abstract concepts to promote disambiguation. You are invited to contribute to gist by adding your comments to issue discussion threads and submitting new issues and pull requests.