GMEOW Ontology — Blackcat Informatics® Inc.

The GMEOW ontology

GMEOW (the Global Metadata and Entity Ontology for the Web) is a reasoning-centric OWL 2 DL super-vocabulary: it unifies the fragmented vocabularies that record digital existence (FOAF, REL, DOAP, PROV-O, schema.org, Wikidata…) into one coherent model grounded in the gUFO upper ontology. Its canonical IRI is this page, so this site is where the vocabulary is published and dereferenced.

GMEOW is built incrementally — "one slice of digital existence at a time." It is also the vocabulary that drives the reasoning engine of gmeow.

At a glance

Namespace	`https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/` (`gmeow:`)
Ontology IRI	`https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow`
Version	`0.1.0`
Logical profile	OWL 2 DL
Foundation	gUFO (a lightweight UFO)
License	CC BY 4.0 (vocabulary) · Apache-2.0 (tooling)
Publisher	Blackcat Informatics® Inc.
Source	Blackcat-Informatics/gmeow-ontology

Modules

The logical content is split across 17 modules; within each, every class is grounded under a gUFO foundational category.

Module	Scope
`core`	Foundational gUFO-grounded categories and the annotation properties shared across all modules.
`entities`	Person, organization, group and software-agent descriptions, plus naming — the FOAF / schema.org superset layer.
`organization`	Organizational roles and memberships — the W3C ORG superset layer.
`accounts`	Online accounts and decentralized identity — FOAF `OnlineAccount` plus a DID layer.
`documents`	Creative works and document metadata — articles, patents, datasets, media, web pages (schema.org / BIBO / BIBFRAME superset).
`software`	Software projects and code repositories — the DOAP / schema.org `SoftwareSourceCode` superset.
`genealogy`	Event- and evidence-centric genealogy: life events as first-class nodes, reified typed kinship, structured names. Supersedes the unmaintained W3C SWAP gedcom; aligned to BIO, GEDCOM X, schema.org, Wikidata, REL, GeoNames.
`agreements`	Legal agreements and contracts, modeled as relators binding their parties.
`contacts`	Contact points and channels (email, telephone, postal), time-scoped contact relationships, and reified interpersonal relationships — schema.org / vCard / REL superset.
`places`	Geographic places and coordinates — the schema.org / GeoSPARQL superset layer.
`expertise`	Skills, occupations and credentials — the schema.org / ESCO superset layer.
`sources`	Sources, citations and the evidence layer for source-cited, confidence-bearing claims.
`temporal`	Cross-cutting time intervals and reified time-scoped relations — the OWL-Time superset layer.
`email`	Email messages, threads, mailboxes and body structure — the JMAP (RFC 8621) superset, also covering RFC 5322, MIME, IMAP and the Gmail API.
`messaging-trust`	Per-message trust and authenticity: relay path, DKIM/SPF/DMARC/ARC results, and cryptographic signatures (S/MIME, PGP).
`trust`	Cross-cutting trust: cryptographic keys, certifications and perspectival owner-trust — the Web-of-Trust superset (OpenPGP, X.509, SSH, Nostr; WOT schema).
`provenance`	Activities, attribution and statement-level annotations (confidence, importance, mapping provenance) — the PROV-O superset layer.

Alignments

GMEOW does not replace existing vocabularies — it aligns to them: 200+ SSSOM correspondences (owl:equivalentClass, rdfs:subClassOf, skos:closeMatch…) tie GMEOW terms to external standards, so it can reason on its own yet interoperate with other datasets.

Alignment targets include: FOAF, schema.org, REL, DOAP, PROV-O, ORG, BIO, vCard, BIBO, Wikidata, GeoNames.

Mappings are maintained as SSSOM tables (mappings/) and compiled into gmeow-alignments.ttl; cross-dataset owl:sameAs links live in gmeow-linksets.ttl.

Serializations & downloads

Several equivalent forms of the same vocabulary. The four canonical serializations are also content-negotiable by Accept header on /gmeow (303 redirects, per the W3C Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies).

File	Contents
`/gmeow.ttl` — Turtle	The canonical vocabulary, most readable form.
`/gmeow.jsonld` — JSON-LD	Web-native serialization; see also the `context.jsonld`.
`/gmeow.rdf` — RDF/XML	The same triples in RDF/XML.
`/gmeow.nt` — N-Triples	One triple per line: bulk load, `diff`, streaming, canonical hashing.
`gmeow-vocab.ttl`	Terms only — no import closure.
`gmeow-full.ttl`	Vocabulary with the gUFO + module import closure.
`gmeow-merged.ttl`	Merged closure (single graph).
`gmeow-reasoned-elk.ttl` · `-hermit.ttl`	Inferred closures from the ELK and HermiT reasoners.
`gmeow-alignments.ttl` · `gmeow-linksets.ttl`	SSSOM alignments and cross-dataset linksets.
`void.ttl` · `dcat.ttl`	VoID and DCAT dataset descriptions.

Reasoning & validation

GMEOW stays deliberately within OWL 2 DL, so decidable reasoners apply: the release ships the inferred closures from the ELK and HermiT reasoners. Trust metrics (transitive validity propagation) are deliberately kept outside the logical core — represent their inputs and outputs, never compute them in OWL.

Full term reference

The class-by-class, property-by-property reference documentation (generated by pyLODE) is at /gmeow/reference.html. Each term IRI (e.g. …/gmeow/Person) dereferences to its anchor in that document. Source, contribution guide and release history live in the GitHub repository.