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. GFO-light is primarily concerned with categories of concrete individuals (continuants, processes, attributives, and situations), i.e., entities that have an immediate relation to time or to space-time.
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.
When developing a domain-specific ontology using 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-light properties).
For more information, see the ontology documentation and our user guide.
Individual IRIs of GFO-light classes and properties (e.g., https://w3id.org/gfo-light/Category) are pointing to the RDF browser RickView.
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 Ontology (RIO) | https://github.com/Onto-Med/RIO | https://w3id.org/rio/ |
Additional examples are available.
Please see our contributing guide.