gistBFO: An Open-Source, BFO-Compatible Version of gist

gist is an open-source, business-focused ontology actively developed by Semantic Arts. Its lightweight design and use of everyday terminology has made it a useful tool for kickstarting domain ontology development in a range of areas including finance, government, and pharmaceuticals. The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is an ISO/IEC standard upper ontology that has similarly found practical application across a variety of domains, especially biomedicine and defense. Given its demonstrated utility, BFO was recently adopted as a baseline standard in the U.S. Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. Because BFO sits at a higher level of abstraction than gist, we see an opportunity to align gist with BFO and get the benefits of both: one can kickstart domain ontology development with gist, all the while maintaining an alignment with the BFO standard. This paper presents such an alignment, which consists primarily of subclass relations from gist classes to BFO classes and includes some subproperty axioms. The union of gist, BFO, and this alignment is what we call “gistBFO.” The upshot is that one can model instance data using gist and then instances of gist classes can be mapped to BFO. This not only achieves compliance with the BFO standard; it also enables interoperability with other domains already modeled using BFO. We describe a methodology for aligning gist and BFO, provide rationale for decisions we made about mappings, and detail a vision for future development.