GMEOW Events Module

• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/events
• Tier: core
• Group: core

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 159 terms and contributes 272 mapping or projection rows. Use it when its terms match the native fact you want to preserve; use the linkage tables to see how those facts leave GMEOW for consumer vocabularies.

Dependencies

• gmeow:slices/documents
• gmeow:slices/kernel
• gmeow:slices/observations
• gmeow:slices/places
• gmeow:slices/provenance
• gmeow:slices/temporal

Consumers

• Participation and life events across slices; the calendar slice; provenance activities.

Local Map

Examples

Wedding

• Source: slices/core/events/examples/wedding.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:Event, gmeow:Participation, gmeow:Person, gmeow:Place, gmeow:eventLocation, gmeow:eventTemporalFrame, gmeow:eventTime, gmeow:eventType, gmeow:eventTypeMarriage, gmeow:hasParticipant
• External prefixes: xsd

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: an event on the four orthogonal axes. A wedding has a
# TYPE (eventTypeMarriage), a temporal placement carried in an EXPLICIT frame
# (P11: the instant is meaningless without its TemporalFrame), and a LOCATION —
# three independent axes. The fourth axis is participation: most attendees ride
# the flat gmeow:hasParticipant (the 80% case), but the principals and the
# officiant are promoted to reified gmeow:Participation relators so their ROLES
# are recorded — the reify-on-demand idiom shared with NameUsage.
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/events/> .
@prefix rdfs:  <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix xsd:   <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

ex:wedding a gmeow:Event ;
    rdfs:label "the marriage of Alex and Sam"@en ;
    gmeow:eventType gmeow:eventTypeMarriage ;
    gmeow:eventTime "2026-06-20T15:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime ;
    gmeow:eventTemporalFrame gmeow:temporalFrameUTCGregorian ;
    gmeow:eventLocation ex:chapel ;
    # Flat participation for the witnesses ONLY — no role/period/evidence needed.
    # The principals and the officiant are instead reified below (with roles), so
    # they are deliberately NOT repeated here: flat and reified never overlap.
    gmeow:hasParticipant ex:witnessA , ex:witnessB .

ex:chapel a gmeow:Place ; gmeow:name "Rosewood Chapel"@en .

ex:alex a gmeow:Person ; gmeow:name "Alex Mercer"@en .
ex:sam a gmeow:Person ; gmeow:name "Sam Okonkwo"@en .
ex:officiant a gmeow:Person ; gmeow:name "Rev. Dana Pike"@en .
ex:witnessA a gmeow:Person ; gmeow:name "Jordan Vance"@en .
ex:witnessB a gmeow:Person ; gmeow:name "Priya Raman"@en .

# --- Reified participations: the two principals and the officiant, with roles.
#     A withdrawn or disputed role would coexist as another Participation
#     (displayable false, or standpoint-indexed) — never overwritten (P9/P10).
ex:partAlex a gmeow:Participation ;
    gmeow:participationEvent ex:wedding ;
    gmeow:participationParticipant ex:alex ;
    gmeow:participationRole gmeow:roleParticipantPrincipal .

ex:partSam a gmeow:Participation ;
    gmeow:participationEvent ex:wedding ;
    gmeow:participationParticipant ex:sam ;
    gmeow:participationRole gmeow:roleParticipantPrincipal .

ex:partOfficiant a gmeow:Participation ;
    gmeow:participationEvent ex:wedding ;
    gmeow:participationParticipant ex:officiant ;
    gmeow:participationRole gmeow:roleOfficiant .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Individuals

Linkages

• Rows: 272
• Projection profiles: crmarchaeo, dcterms, gedcom, ical, iptc, lrmoo, oai_dc, owl-time, prov, schema-org, schema-org-schedule, vcard
• External vocabularies: bbc, bio, crm, crmarc, crmgeo, dc, dcmitype, dcterms, gedcom, gx, ical, iptc, lode, lrmoo, obi, org, prov, qb, rdf, schema, sem, teo, time, vcard, wd, wdt

Guide

Events — occurrences, participation, and the four orthogonal axes

Slice: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/events · tier: core The universal occurrence: entities participate in roles, over possibly fuzzy time, at possibly several places, per possibly conflicting sources.

A GMEOW event is a temporal occurrence in which entities participate in roles, over possibly fuzzy time, at possibly several locations, asserted by possibly conflicting sources. The slice supersets schema.org Event, CIDOC-CRM E5/E7/E92, OWL-Time, PROV-O Activity, iCalendar VEVENT, LODE, SEM, and Wikidata by reference (Principle 5), and absorbed the former genealogy event hierarchy (Principle 6): thirty-odd LifeEvent subclasses and role subproperties became value individuals.

The no-mess rules. Type is a value, not a class — one gmeow:Event class, kinds in an open value vocabulary (Principle 9, no overtyping). Role is a value on a relator, never a subproperty. Four orthogonal axes — eventType ⟂ participationRole ⟂ temporal ⟂ location — with no inferential bridge. Flat-first, reify on demand — gmeow:hasParticipant for the 80 % case, gmeow:Participation when role, period, confidence, or evidence matters. Co-equal conflicting claims coexist — no primary date; corrections use gmeow:displayable false, never deletion (Principle 10). DL-clean time (Principle 3) — base triples are xsd:dateTime, never xsd:date.

The occurrence and its kind

gmeow:Event

The universal occurrence — gmeow:Activity (provenance) and gmeow:LifeEvent re-parent onto it, so it is the genuine top event of the model. Declares gmeow:requiresFrame gmeow:eventTemporalFrame at warning severity (Principle 11).

gmeow:eventType · gmeow:EventType

The kind of an occurrence as an open value vocabulary — birth, marriage, merger, commit, image capture, expression creation — seeded from BIO, GEDCOM X, LRMoo, and CIDOC-CRM. Non-functional by design: one occurrence may be both a marriage and a religious rite, and a birth is also a gmeow:eventTypeCreation (the lifecycle hook). An unforeseen kind is a fresh labelled individual, never a new class (Principle 9).

gmeow:LifeEvent

A thin, person-scoped phase of Event — not a type taxonomy: the specific kind stays a value (gmeow:eventTypeBirth, …). It is the seam joining the names module to the event spine: gmeow:conferredByEvent ranges over it.

Participation (the centerpiece relator)

gmeow:Participation

The reified, time-scoped, evidence-bearing fact that an entity took part in an event in a role — the NameUsage/IdentityFacet idiom, one per (event, participant, role) tuple. A disputed role is several standpoint-indexed Participations, none privileged; a withdrawn one keeps gmeow:displayable false. EL axioms require some event and participant; closed-world cardinality is SHACL's.

gmeow:participationEvent · gmeow:participationParticipant · gmeow:participationRole · gmeow:participationInterval

The relator's posts: exactly one event (functional); one or more participants (range gmeow:Entity, not just Agent — a document signed, a place visited); zero or more roles (non-functional, mirroring eventType — competing role claims coexist via gmeow:accordingTo); and an optional interval over which the participation held.

gmeow:hasParticipant

The flat 80 %-case shortcut, Event → Agent. gmeow:pairsWith gmeow:Participation (machine-readable, documentation doctrine): promote the moment role, period, confidence, or evidence must be recorded — the hasMet/InterpersonalRelationship duality.

gmeow:ParticipantRole

The open role vocabulary: principal/subject, organizer, attendee, performer, officiant, witness, victim, agent, beneficiary, employee, employer. A role not among the seeds is a fresh individual — never a new participation subproperty.

Time, fuzziness, and place

gmeow:eventTime · gmeow:eventInterval · gmeow:earliestStart · gmeow:latestEnd · gmeow:temporalPrecision

The temporal axis, three honest shapes: a point event uses eventTime (xsd:dateTime); a crisp span uses eventInterval (the temporal slice's TimeInterval); a fuzzy date uses the earliestStart/latestEnd bounds plus a gmeow:TemporalPrecision value (day/month/year/decade/circa) — uncertainty modelled, not smuggled into a string. All non-functional: competing standpoint-indexed dates coexist, confidence-weighted, annotated by the four statement clocks (temporal slice).

gmeow:eventLocation · gmeow:eventTrajectory · gmeow:eventSpacetime

The spatial axis: one or more gmeow:Location values (geographic or virtual — a property chain lifts an event to every containing location); a gmeow:Trajectory for moving events; and gmeow:LocationState spacetime slices carrying pose and velocity relative to an explicit frame (Principle 11).

gmeow:eventFromLocation · gmeow:eventToLocation

The endpoint pair for movement events — migrations, moves, journeys, relocations. Both are specialisations of gmeow:eventLocation (an origin or destination IS a location of the event, so plain location consumers keep working), and together they are the discrete sibling of the continuous gmeow:eventTrajectory. A movement event with one known endpoint carries just that endpoint. With gmeow:eventTypeMigration (or immigration/emigration) this is the canonical home of relocation history; the schema.org projection derives schema:MoveAction + fromLocation/toLocation from exactly this shape.

gmeow:subEventOf · gmeow:hasSubEvent

Event mereology — conference → session → talk — transitive specializations of the universal partOf/hasPart spine, kept out of all cardinality axioms to preserve OWL 2 DL regularity. Mereological, not temporal: containment in time is gmeow:during/gmeow:contains.

gmeow:before · gmeow:after · gmeow:coincidesWith (the event-level Allen family)

Thirteen qualitative event-event temporal relations (meets/metBy, overlaps/overlappedBy, starts/startedBy, during/contains, finishes/finishedBy complete the set) — the TimeML TLINK / TEO idiom. Before/after and during/contains are transitive; coincidesWith asserts temporal simultaneity only, never identity. Kept strictly apart from the interval-level Allen family.

Series, duration, observation

gmeow:EventSeries · gmeow:hasRecurrenceRule · gmeow:Duration

Planned-vs-actual: a series issues concrete occurrences (gmeow:seriesOccurrence); its gmeow:RecurrenceRule carries an RFC 5545 RRULE string projected straight to iCalendar; a Duration is an unanchored length (xsd:duration, DL-clean), distinct from the anchored interval. Tense and aspect (gmeow:eventTense, gmeow:eventAspect) are ISO-TimeML annotation-layer only — about the mention in text, never the occurrence.

gmeow:ObservationalActivity · gmeow:generatedObservation

The seam to the observation stack (observation-linkage design): an activity whose purpose is producing observations — survey, census activity, excavation, audit, clinical trial (all type values). A property chain associates the activity with the vantage of its observations; the inverse rides gmeow:wasGeneratedBy, deliberately not declared owl:inverseOf to keep OWL 2 DL typing honest.

Solver layer & deferred alignment

The full Allen composition table is not expressible in OWL DL and is not asserted: a reasoner derives the sound transitive closures; everything richer — composition, cross-family JEPD between event-level and interval-level relations — is SHACL-gate and solver work (Principle 12). Recurrence expansion is likewise computed; RRULE structure stays a projection concern, and the LODE/SEM/CIDOC bridges stay references, never imports (Principle 5).

Dependencies

Depends on kernel, documents, observations, places, provenance, and temporal. Consumed by participation and life events across slices, the calendar slice, the lifecycle slice's creation/destruction hooks, and provenance activities.