minConcept

minConcept is a lightweight conceptual modeling framework designed to simplify the representation of domain knowledge for software systems, artificial intelligence, and data integration projects. It provides a minimal syntax for declaring concepts, attributes, and relationships, typically expressed in JSON or YAML, and can be consumed by compilers or runtime engines to generate schemas, APIs, or semantic graphs.

The framework was introduced in 2020 by the Knowledge Engineering Laboratory at the University of Oslo. The original goal was to reduce the boilerplate associated with traditional ontology languages such as OWL while retaining sufficient expressiveness for rule‑based reasoning and data validation. As a result, minConcept emphasizes composability, allowing concepts to be defined once and reused across multiple applications, and interoperability, enabling seamless export to RDF or SQL databases.

Key features include concise concept declaration, automatic generation of RESTful endpoints, support for versioning and conflict resolution, and built‑in validation against constraints. A small yet growing open‑source community maintains the reference implementation in both TypeScript and Python, along with editor extensions for common IDEs.

Adoption of minConcept has spread mainly within academia, where it is used for teaching knowledge representation, and in industry for rapidly prototyping knowledge‑aware services. Ongoing work focuses on extending the language with support for temporal constraints and integrating it with popular graph databases, aiming to broaden its applicability to large‑scale, real‑time knowledge applications.