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Common Core Ontologies (CCO)

  • What it is — CCO is a suite of eleven ontologies containing logically defined generic terms and relations intended to cover entities across domains. It is a mid-level ontology extending the ISO-standard top-level Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), adding broadly reusable classes such as person, facility, date, employment, nickname, and measurement.

  • Key concepts

    • CCO occupies the mid-level between BFO’s most generic categories and domain-specific ontologies; its authors explicitly encourage users to publish their own domain extensions rather than expanding CCO indefinitely with domain content.
    • Its eleven modules cover geospatial entities, information entities, events, time, agents, qualities, measurement units, currencies, facilities, artifacts, and extended relations.
    • Documented design patterns are motivated by use cases and competency questions, and include a Mermaid graph, a visualization, and a SPARQL query.

  • How you’d use it — Clone the repository and import AllCoreOntology.ttl into Protégé to assemble the eleven modules, or use the pre-merged files under src/cco-merged/ to avoid managing imports. Releases are also viewable through the Industrial Ontology Portal; documented patterns can be reused for RDF data mapping and SPARQL querying.

  • LLM angle — The documentation explicitly recommends reusing CCO design patterns in knowledge graphs to speed data mapping and querying and improve consistency and interoperability. No LLM- or RAG-specific use is stated.

  • Pitfalls & lessons

    • CCO is not intended to absorb content specific to individual domains; that content belongs in domain extensions.
    • The repository is undergoing modernization through planned 3.0 and 4.0 structural changes. The Governance Board recommends waiting until after 4.0 to update, while users needing current changes should pull from develop.
    • Different OWL API and Protégé versions can generate spurious formatting diffs; contributors are told to make a token change and inspect the diff before substantive edits, then verify that the result loads correctly in Protégé.
    • Version 2.0 changed the IRI namespace and adopted opaque local identifiers; the release summary says there were no other ontology changes from v1.7 to v2.0.

  • Verdict — A documented cross-domain mid-level foundation for shared classes, relations, and reusable knowledge-graph patterns, intended to sit beneath separately maintained domain extensions.

Sources consulted

  • README.md
  • documentation/README.md
  • documentation/user-guides/design-patterns/README.md
  • documentation/contributing/README.md
  • documentation/contributing/contributing.md
  • documentation/contributing/registering IRIs.md
  • documentation/diff-reports-previous-version/README.md
  • documentation/diff-reports-previous-version/v1.7-release-summary.md