TUpper (COLORE CLIF/OWL formalization)¶
Local reference identifier:
xwkont:ref:tupper-coloreSlug:tupper-coloreEditorial status:candidateCreated:2026-07-02Modified:2026-07-05
Descriptive Metadata¶
| Field | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Title | TUpper | A top-level ontology built on PSL (Process Specification Language); this record covers its open CLIF/OWL formalization in COLORE, not the ISO/IEC 21838-4:2023 standard text itself (not accessed in this pass — see Source Relation Notes). |
| Creator | Michael Grüninger | Per the CLIF file's own header comment ("Contributors: Michael Gruninger - initial implementation"), University of Toronto. |
| Contributor | unknown | Full contributor list not verified in this pass; the associated 2022 Applied Ontology paper adds Yi Ru and Jona Thai as co-authors, but that paper was not accessed (see Source Relation Notes). |
| Publisher | University of Toronto; hosted in the COLORE (Common Logic Ontology Repository and Evaluation) GitHub repository, github.com/gruninger/colore |
|
| Source type | ontology specification (Common Logic / CLIF, with an OWL rendering) | tupper.clif is a thin import wrapper over PSL modules (disc_state, psl_actocc, occupy_root, fount); term-level informal semantics are documented separately in TUpper-Terms.html. |
| Version or edition | unknown — no version metadata in the fetched files | |
| Identifier or URL | https://github.com/gruninger/colore/blob/master/ontologies/tupper/ (directory); https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gruninger/colore/master/ontologies/tupper/owl/tupper.all.owl (OWL); https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gruninger/colore/master/ontologies/tupper/tupper.clif (CLIF) | No DOI. |
| Access date | 2026-07-02 | |
| Snapshot / Stable identifier | https://github.com/gruninger/colore/blob/master/ontologies/tupper/owl/tupper.all.owl → http://web.archive.org/web/20221024070550/https://github.com/gruninger/colore/blob/master/ontologies/tupper/owl/tupper.all.owl (2022-10-24), verified retrievable via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at time of writing, per ADR-0012. |
|
| Rights/license | CC-BY-SA-4.0 | Per tupper.clif's own header comment ("licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported license"). |
| Archive mirror status | eligible — license permits redistribution, not yet mirrored | Per ADR-0016. CC-BY-SA-4.0 is verified from tupper.clif's own header comment (see Rights/license), which is sufficient to make this record eligible; actual mirroring (hosting location, fetch, publish) is separate future work not yet started. |
Source Relation Notes¶
This record covers TUpper's open COLORE formalization, not ISO/IEC 21838-4:2023 itself. ADR-0015 and TODO.md both flagged TUpper's ISO standardization as its strongest inclusion rationale, but the ISO standard text is a purchasable document not fetched in this pass. Nor was the dedicated 2022 Applied Ontology paper (Grüninger, Ru & Thai, "TUpper: A top level ontology within standards," 10.3233/AO-220263) accessed — a direct HTTP fetch of its IOS Press content-download URL returned HTTP 403 (Cloudflare block), the same pattern that blocked xwkont:ref:borgo-galton-kutz-2022 and the YAMATO 2022 paper.
TUpper's own CLIF/OWL files, maintained by the same author (Grüninger) in the public COLORE repository, are directly fetchable and are the authoritative machine-readable formalization TUpper's ISO standardization and paper both describe — Grüninger's COLORE work substantially predates and underlies both. This record treats the COLORE artifacts as a legitimate primary source for TUpper's own vocabulary and definitions, while explicitly not claiming to have verified the ISO standard text's exact wording, which may differ in presentation (though not, per COLORE's stated role as the working formalization, in substance).
TUpper builds on PSL (Process Specification Language, also a Grüninger project); its base vocabulary (object, activity, activity_occurrence, timepoint) is inherited from PSL's ontology of activities and objects, not authored fresh for TUpper.
Rights and License Notes¶
CC-BY-SA-4.0, per tupper.clif's own header. Not independently cross-checked against a separate repository-level LICENSE file.
Citation and Locator Notes¶
Recommended citation: Grüninger, M. TUpper (COLORE formalization). University of Toronto. https://github.com/gruninger/colore/tree/master/ontologies/tupper.
Direct primary-source verification (2026-07-02): tupper.all.owl, tupper.clif, and TUpper-Terms.html were fetched directly from the gruninger/colore GitHub repository (master branch, confirmed via the GitHub Contents API before fetching, so as not to trust an unverified WebSearch-reported URL) and read directly. TUpper does not use continuant/occurrent (or endurant/perdurant) terminology at all; its top-level vocabulary, inherited from PSL, is object / activity / activity_occurrence / timepoint. Exact informal-semantics text from TUpper-Terms.html:
object: "(object x) is TRUE in an interpretation of TUpper if and only if x is a member of the class of objects in the universe of discourse of the interpretation. An object is anything that is not a timepoint, nor an activity nor an activity-occurrence. Intuitively, an object is a concrete or abstract thing that can participate in an activity. Objects can come into existence (be created) and go out of existence (be 'used up' as a resource) at certain points in time."activity_occurrence: "(activity_occurrence occ) is TRUE in an interpretation of TUpper if and only if occ is a member of the class of activity occurrences in the universe of discourse of the interpretation. An activity occurrence is associated with a unique activity" via theoccurrence_ofrelation.timepoint: "(timepoint t) is TRUE in an interpretation of TUpper if and only if t is a member of the class of timepoints in the universe of discourse of the interpretation. Timepoints form a linear ordering."
object is defined negatively (anything that is not a timepoint, activity, or activity-occurrence) rather than by a positive temporal-persistence criterion — a different definitional style from BFO/DOLCE/UFO's "wholly present at a time" framing, GFO's Presential/Occurrent split, or YAMATO's continuant/occurrent labels. See continuant-occurrent.md's Uncertainty section for how this is handled in the crosswalk's mapping confidence.
Reused for object.md (2026-07-02): the same object term (quoted above) is TUpper's only Object-equivalent — no more specific sub-term exists in the fetched files. See object.md's correspondence row 008.
Reused for event.md (2026-07-02): TUpper-Terms.html's full activity_occurrence entry was read directly, including its NOTE: "An activity occurrence is not an instance of an activity." This is TUpper's closest structural analog to Event, but it is a type/token (occurrence-of) relation, not a Process/Event category split — treated as unknown confidence, consistent with object.md's TUpper precedent. See event.md's Source Definitions and correspondence row 009.
Reused for process.md (2026-07-02): TUpper-Terms.html's activity entry (the repeatable type, distinct from the token activity_occurrence already used in event.md) was read directly: "(activity a) is TRUE in an interpretation of TUpper if and only if a is a member of the class of activities in the universe of discourse of the interpretation." A minimal, circular-looking gloss typical of PSL's axiomatic style — treated as unknown confidence against BFO's particular-denoting Process, since activity is a type. See process.md's Source Definitions and correspondence row 007.
Reused for information-artifact.md (2026-07-02): both tupper.all.owl and TUpper-Terms.html were searched directly for "information," "content," and "represent" — zero occurrences of any of the three. No Information-Artifact correspondence recorded; the most clear-cut absence of any source in that crosswalk. See information-artifact.md's Source Definitions.
Reused for quality.md (2026-07-02): tupper.all.owl was searched for a reified Quality/Attribute/Property class; none was found. Instead, physical measurements (mass, volume, physical_length, physical_area, physical_density) are declared as FunctionalObjectProperty relations directly from an object to a value — a third modeling style, distinct from both the trope-theoretic (BFO/DOLCE/UFO/GFO/YAMATO) and abstract-entity (SUMO) camps. See quality.md's Source Definitions.
Reused for relation.md (2026-07-02): both tupper.all.owl and TUpper-Terms.html were searched for a reified Relation class; none was found. Relations are exclusively bare OWL/CLIF binary predicates (occurrence_of, subactivity, precedes, earlier, etc.), each documented in prose but never reified as an instance of a "Relation" class — the same non-reification pattern already found for Quality. See relation.md's Source Definitions.
Reused for role.md (2026-07-02): TUpper-Terms.html was searched for a reified Role class; none was found. The word "role" appears only once, informally, inside participates_in's prose gloss: "x plays some role that is not pre-specified in an occurrence of the activity a." No class represents "a role" as a thing in its own right — the third concept in this repository (after Quality, Relation) where TUpper reifies nothing. See role.md's Source Definitions.
Reused for time.md (2026-07-04): TUpper-Terms.html was re-fetched and its timepoint entry read directly (quoted above in full): "Timepoints form a linear ordering." Also confirmed inf-/inf+ (the unique earliest/latest timepoint) and beginof (a function from an activity-occurrence to the timepoint at which it begins: "If x is an activity occurence... then (beginof x) has the value t if and only if t is the timepoint at which the activity occurrence x begins"). timepoint is TUpper's only temporal class — one of its four flat, co-equal top-level classes (object/activity/activity_occurrence/timepoint, object defined negatively as "anything that is not a timepoint, nor an activity nor an activity-occurrence"). No interval/duration-equivalent class exists in the fetched files; timepoint denotes an instant-like entity in a linear order, not a region. Note: the canonical tupper.all.owl path recorded above 404'd on this pass (repository structure may have shifted) — tupper.clif/TUpper-Terms.html are still live and were used instead; a future pass touching TUpper's OWL rendering specifically should re-verify the current path before citing it. See time.md's Source Definitions and correspondence row 006.
Reused for docs/methodology/source-ontology-module-conventions.md (2026-07-05, resolving ADR-0021's TUpper gap — the strongest hit of all 8 sources checked): the gruninger/colore repository's ontologies directory was fetched directly via the GitHub Contents API and found to contain a directory literally named psl_core, sibling to over a dozen psl_* extension directories (psl_actocc, psl_actors, psl_atomic, psl_complex, psl_disc_state, psl_duration, psl_locations, psl_occtree, psl_occurrence, psl_participates, psl_resources, psl_soo, psl_subactivity, extended_psl, interval_psl). tupper.clif itself (already quoted above) imports four of these extension modules (disc_state, actocc, occupy_root, fount), which in turn build on PSL-Core. PSL's own published documentation (Grüninger et al., "The Process Specification Language (PSL) Overview and Version 1.0 Specification," NIST) states this explicitly: "The PSL Ontology is a set of first-order theories organized into PSL-Core and a partially ordered set of extensions. All extensions within PSL are consistent extensions of PSL-Core, although not all extensions within PSL need be mutually consistent." This is the clearest and most explicit "core" self-description found across all 8 sources — a literal directory name plus an explicit prose statement, closely paralleling GFO's own README language ("parallel extensions... not all... consistent with each other").
Reused for list-sequence.md (2026-07-07): tupper.all.owl, tupper.clif, and TUpper-Terms.html were all re-fetched and directly grepped for "list," "sequence," "tuple," and "ordered." tupper.all.owl and tupper.clif had zero occurrences of any of the four terms; TUpper-Terms.html had exactly one, informal prose describing Occurrence Trees ("the set of all sequences of activity occurrences forms a tree; the earlier relation specifies the partial ordering over the activity occurrences in this tree"), not a dedicated ordered-collection class. Recorded as a scoped absence. See list-sequence.md's Source Definitions.
Reused for continuous-discrete.md (2026-07-07): tupper.all.owl and TUpper-Terms.html were re-fetched and confirmed directly: tupper.all.owl declares atomic as a class with SubClassOf axioms (primitive/atomic, generator/atomic, atomic/activity) but no skos:definition; TUpper-Terms.html's own prose gloss (§(atomic a)) reads "(atomic a) is TRUE in an interpretation of TUpper if and only if either a is primitive or it is the concurrent superposition of a set of primitive activities," and separately states "The subactivity relation forms a discrete partial ordering over the set of activities." Both quotes are activity-specific, not an entity-level continuous/discrete split — confirms the crosswalk's draft finding exactly. (This second quote was also, in error, cross-attributed to SUMO in the original draft's SUMO row; corrected during Claude's independent review pass — see xwkont:ref:sumo-niles-pease-2001's own note on this.) See continuous-discrete.md's Source Definitions.
Reused for modality.md (2026-07-07): TUpper-Terms.html was re-fetched and its poss entry read directly: "(poss a occ) is TRUE in an interpretation of TUpper if and only if the activity a can possibly occur after the activity occurrence occ." This is TUpper's only explicit modal predicate — an operator-level possibility constraint over activity/occurrence structure, not a reified quality or attribute class. See modality.md's Source Definitions and correspondence row 007.
Reused for non-physical-social-object.md (2026-07-07, session-048): TUpper-Terms.html's object entry was reused unchanged from the already-verified quotation on file above ("An object is anything that is not a timepoint, nor an activity nor an activity-occurrence"), confirmed accurate against the draft. Broad and negatively-defined, includes abstract things by TUpper's own prose, but not a dedicated social-object branch. See non-physical-social-object.md's Source Definitions and correspondence row 007.
Reused for symbol-sign-representation.md (2026-07-07, session-049): tupper.all.owl and TUpper-Terms.html were re-fetched fresh and grepped directly for "symbol," "sign," "signifier," "name," "linguistic," "icon," and "word." Zero occurrences of any of the seven terms in either file. Confirms the crosswalk's draft finding of a clean absence exactly. See symbol-sign-representation.md's Source Definitions.