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.

The Common Core Ontologies(CCO) are designed as a mid-level ontology suite that extends the Basic Formal Ontology. In 2017,CUBRC, Inc. made CCO openly available. CCO has since been increasingly adopted by a broad group of users and applications and is proposed as the first standard mid-level ontology. Despite these successes, documentation of the contents and design patterns of the CCO has been comparatively minimal. This paper is a step toward providing enhanced documentation for the mid-level ontology suite through a discussion of the contents of the eleven ontologies that collectively comprise the Common Core Ontology suite.