gUFO: A Gentle Foundational Ontology for Semantic Web Knowledge Graphs

TL;DR

gUFO is a lightweight, standardized foundational ontology tailored for Semantic Web knowledge graphs, offering unique typology support, reification patterns, and high-order types to enhance semantic modeling.

Contribution

It introduces gUFO, a novel OWL 2 DL implementation of UFO with distinctive features like typology, reification, and support for situations, advancing semantic web applications.

Findings

gUFO supports typology of types based on OntoClean

It offers reification patterns for intrinsic and relational aspects

gUFO has been adopted by the community and differs from other UFO implementations

Abstract

gUFO is a lightweight implementation of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) suitable for Semantic Web OWL 2 DL applications. UFO is a mature foundational ontology with a rich axiomatization and that has been employed in a significant number of projects in research and industry. Moreover, it is currently in the process of standardization by the International Organization for Standardization as the ISO/IEC CD 21838-5. gUFO stands out from other foundational ontology implementations (such as those provided for BFO and DOLCE) given its unique support for a typology of types (operationalizing OntoClean guidelines), its reification patterns for intrinsic and relational aspects, and its support for situations and high-order types. gUFO provides well-founded patterns to address recurrent problems in Semantic Web knowledge graphs. In this paper, we present gUFO with its constituting categories, relations and constraints, discuss how it differs from the original UFO reference ontology, elaborate on its community adoption, and systematically position it in relation to existing OWL-based implementations of popular alternative foundational ontologies.