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. 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.
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.
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The Periodic Table of Gist
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.
gist forum
We maintain an active gist community where practitioners and users of gist come together to discuss the gist model, implementation best practices, and evolution. Virtual meetings take place the first Thursday of each month. Click here to become involved.
gist repository
We maintain extensive narrative and graphical documentation for download from the gist-doc GitHub repository. You can also view the WIDOCO documentation directly online.
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gist Articles & Video Resources
2024
A BFO-ready version of gist
Dave McComb / October, 2024
Background
An upper ontology is a high-level data model that can be specialized to create a domain specific data model. A good upper ontology is a force multiplier that can speed the development of your domain model. It promotes interoperability and can be used as the basis for an information system. Two domain models derived from the same upper ontology are far easier to harmonize.
gist (not an acronym, but the word meaning “get the essence of”) is an upper ontology, focused on the enterprise information systems domain. It was initially developed by Semantic Arts in 2007 and has been refined in over 100 commercial implementation projects.
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Units of Measure & Magnitudes
2023
Toward a Knowledge Ontology
Toward a Knowledge Ontology pt2
Temporal relations
Removal of inverses
Knowledge graph modeling: time series micro-pattern using GIST
gist jumpstart
Extending an upper-level ontology (like GIST)
2022
Get the gist: start building simplicity now
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