General Formal Ontology (light version)

Introduction

GFO-light contains some simplifications compared to the full version of General Formal Ontology (GFO, Loebe, F. et al. (2022). GFO: The General Formal Ontology.) and is designed as a framework for the efficient development and foundation of domain/application ontologies. This guide describes the structure and a possible use of this lightweight top-level ontology in domain-specific projects, also for users who are not familiar with the basics of formal ontologies. GFO-light is primarily concerned with categories of concrete individuals (Continuant, Attributive, Process and Situation), i.e., entities that have an immediate relation to time (TimeEntity) or to space-time.

⚠ GFO-light extends GFO-core (i.e., adopts all GFO-core axioms), which contains the core GFO entities and serves as a common basis for both GFO variants (light and full). For some use cases, it may be sufficient to use GFO-core alone as a kind of minimal top-level ontology.

Fig. 1. GFO-light overview (The figure shows all categories and selected relations. The GFO-core categories are displayed as filled boxes.)

How to Use

You just need to import this ontology into your domain-specific ontology via the IRI https://w3id.org/gfo-light. For each release of this ontology, a version IRI is available with the format https://w3id.org/gfo-light/release/<VERSION>. In addition, the version IRI https://w3id.org/gfo-light/release/latest always represents the latest version. If you want to import only GFO-core, please use the IRI https://w3id.org/gfo-core in the same way.

When developing a domain-specific ontology using GFO-core or GFO-light, please create your classes as subclasses of Continuant, Attributive, Process, Situation and TimeEntity (or their subclasses, the more specific the better). You can also create the desired object or data properties (if possible as subproperties of GFO-core or GFO-light properties).

For more information, see our user guide, the GFO-light documentation or the GFO-core documentation.

Individual IRIs of GFO-core and GFO-light classes and properties (e.g., https://w3id.org/gfo-light/Quality) are pointing to the RDF browser RickView.

Examples

Here is a selection of ontologies we maintain that are founded in GFO-light and can serve as a starting point for working with GFO-light.

| Ontology | Repository | IRI | | ---------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------- | ------------------------------- | | Anthropological Notation Ontology (ANNO) | https://github.com/annosaxfdm/ontology | https://annosaxfdm.de/ontology/ | | Risk Identification Ontology (RIO) | https://github.com/Onto-Med/RIO | https://w3id.org/rio/ | | Core Ontology of Phenotyping (COP) | https://github.com/Onto-Med/COP | https://w3id.org/cop/ |

Additional examples are available.

How to Contribute

Please see our contributing guide.

See Also

• General Formal Ontology
• Top-level ontology