gist doesn't stand for anything. It's an ordinary word meaning "a general understanding," which is exactly what the ontology provides: a small set of concepts general enough to underpin almost any business application.
gist is Semantic Arts' minimalist upper ontology for the enterprise. It defines just under 100 classes and just under 100 properties—deliberately few—and is free to use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
One design goal was completeness: it is meant to cover nearly all the concepts that come up in real world enterprise ontology development. In our last several ontology projects we have found that fewer than 5% of the concepts uncovered are not directly expressible using the gist primitives. Another goal was to promote disambiguation. We have avoided highly abstract concepts, as they tend to be ambiguous, and we have gradually culled out ambiguous business terms. gist is very highly axiomized, and as such when used it is highly self-correcting.
What does gist stand for?
Nothing — gist is not an acronym. It's an ordinary word meaning "a general understanding," chosen because that's what the ontology gives you: a general foundation of concepts on which more specific models are built.
What is gist?
gist is a minimalist upper ontology for the enterprise, developed and maintained by Semantic Arts. It defines just under 100 classes and just under 100 properties, covering the concepts that recur across most business domains with as little ambiguity as possible.
Is gist free to use?
Yes. gist is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, so you can use it for any purpose as long as you give attribution. Development happens in the open on GitHub.
Why is gist called "minimalist"?
Because coverage comes from having few primitives rather than many. A small vocabulary is easier to agree on, easier to reuse across domains, and less likely to introduce the ambiguity that larger upper ontologies carry.