Ontology IRI: https://w3id.org/semanticarts/ontology/gistCore
gist is Semantic Arts’ minimalist upper ontology for the enterprise. It is designed to provide the maximum coverage of typical business concepts with the fewest number of primitives and the least amount of ambiguity.
Our gist ontology is free (as in free speech and free beer): it is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. You can use it as you see fit for any purpose, as long as you give us attribution.
Ongoing development of gist is open to the public at the gist GitHub repository. You can contribute to gist by adding your comments to issue discussion threads and submitting new issues and pull requests. Minutes from our biweekly internal development team meetings are posted on the repository wiki so you can find out what we’ve been discussing and get a preview of upcoming changes to gist.
To use the gist files locally, download a zipped archive and import these files directly into your ontology editor of choice: Protégé, TopBraid, etc. You can also import into Protégé via the versioned URI without downloading the files first.
Design Features
Significant design features of gist include, but are not limited to:
gist defines a small number of top-level concepts on which everything else is based, both in gist itself and in enterprise or application ontologies that use gist as a foundation. These concepts are not philosophical abstractions with unfamiliar terms such as endurant, perdurant, or qualia; they are everyday concepts with ordinary names such as person, organization and agreement, whose meanings are just what you would expect. These high-level concepts provide building blocks for defining more specific domain concepts in a gist-based ontology.
gist has extensive and fine-grained disjointness at the highest level in order to help you avoid making certain types of logical errors in your ontologies or data that are based on gist. By explicitly stating, for example, that governmental organizations (such as the US federal government) can’t be intergovernmental organizations (such as the UN), a reasoner will complain of logical inconsistency if something has been typed as both. Without disjointness, such inconsistencies will not be surfaced.
gist uses domain and range specifications sparingly in order to make properties more broadly applicable. Subclasses are typically defined using a pattern that specifies the sense in which it specializes its superclass.
Latest Release: gist 13.0.0
gist 13.0.0 is a major release that includes a number of changes that break backward compatibility with previous versions of gist. The release package includes documentation and scripts to help you migrate your extension ontologies and instance data from earlier versions of gist: see the Major Version Migration section below.
The most notable changes in this release are a completely rearchitected model of units of measure and magnitudes and a new address model. See the Release Notes for full details of all major and minor changes in gist 13.0.0.
The release package includes:
- The gist core ontology
- Supplementary ontologies of RDFS annotations and materialized subclass inferences to support a variety of applications and reasoners.
- Documentation in both HTML and Markdown formats. This documentation includes guidance and recommendations on the of the new unit of measure and address models.
- Migration scripts and documentation to upgrade your ontologies and instance data to gist 13.
All ontologies are provided in Turtle, RDF/XML, and JSON-LD serializations.
Major Version Migration
Major versions are not backward compatible. To facilitate migration of your gist-based ontologies and instance data to the latest major version of gist, the release package contains migration scripts and instructions. You must apply the migration scripts in sequence; e.g., if you are using gist 11, you must apply the gist 12 migrations scripts before the gist 13 scripts. See the migration guide in the release package for further details.
gist is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which only requires that you attribute the source (http://semanticarts.com/gist) when you use it. In addition, we require that any gist concepts remain in the gist namespace (https://w3id.org/semanticarts/ns/ontology/gist/) and that you not define your own terms within the gist namespace.
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The gist Forum gathers every other month for discussion on best practices, development and adoption of gist.
Active and potential users are invited to join using the sign up below.
gist Forum
We maintain an active gist community forum where practitioners and users of gist come together to discuss the gist model, implementation best practices, and evolution.
Meetings occur virtually on the first Thursday of every other month, starting in January.
Please fill out the form here if you would like to become involved.
