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 3.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 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 also contribute to gist by adding your comments to issue discussion threads and submitting new issues and pull requests. Minutes from our biweekly internal issue review sessions are posted on this wiki so you can find out what we've been discussing and get a preview of upcoming changes to gist.
To use the files locally, download a zipped archive containing gist as well as documentation. You can import these files directly into your ontology editor of choice: Protégé, Topbraid, etc.
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 Version
Version 11.1.0 of gist was released in October 2022. It is now available for download.
The release package includes:
- gist ontologies serialized in Turtle, RDF/XML, and JSON-LD
- Documentation in both Markdown and HTML formats
- RDFS annotations that can be imported for applications that are dependent on them (gist itself uses SKOS annotations).
As a minor upgrade, all changes in this version are backward compatible, so it is possible to upgrade without making any changes to your gist-based domain ontologies or data. Terms slated for eventual removal or replacement are deprecated in minor versions, so that you can continue using them until the next major upgrade by importing the accompanying deprecation ontology. Please refer to the Release Notes for more details on the updates included in this version.
If you have not yet upgraded to version 11.0.0, see the Migration section below.
See All Previous Versions here.
Last Major Release: 11.0.0
The last major version, 11.0.0, included the following major changes:
- Time – A simpler and more intuitive model for time that employs datatype properties rather than objects representing time instants.
- Governments & geographical regions – A new model that implements the subtle but important distinction between governments and governed geographical regions.
- We have been developing a best practice style guide for our ontology projects, and have updated gist to be conformant with our recommendations, resulting in the renaming of many terms without any change in meaning. We’ve also made several other changes as we continue to refine our vision for a minimalist enterprise upper ontology.
Major Version Migration
Major versions are not backward compatible. To facilitate migration of both your gist-based ontologies and data to the latest major version of gist, the release package contains migration scripts and instructions, along with instructions for implementing the new time model. If you are currently using gist 9.x or earlier, you must apply the migration scripts in sequence - e.g., first 10.x and then 11.x.
Documentation
We offer extensive narrative and graphical documentation for download from the gist-doc GitHub repository. This repository contains an eBook, visualizations, and WIDOCO documentation. You can also view the WIDOCO documentation directly online.
gist is distributed under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-ShareAlike 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://ontologies.semanticarts.com/gist/), and that you not define your own terms within the gist namespace.
(Can't afford free? Purchase a perpetual license)
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.
