The Generalized Upper Model is currently being fully re-engineered in OWL-DL and employing up to date ontological engineering principles. Axiomatization is being extended and particular detail is being provided for the area of spatial semantics.

It is now maintained by the Bremen Ontology Research Group, where more detailed information and downloads are available under the heading 'linguistic ontology'.

Signature generated from the in progress OWL revision (Jan 05) [and for comparison, a signature generated from the old Penman Upper Model by the same procedure, drawing on an OWL-version kindly provided by Leo Ferres],

The Generalized Upper Model is a descendent of the Penman Upper Model, originally developed by Bill Mann, Christian Matthiessen and others at the USC/ISI in Los Angeles. The Penman Upper Model was later integrated via the Sensus model into the Cyc ontology.

For multilingual applications, the Penman Upper Model was merged in 1994 with a parallel German development; the results of that merger or described the paper "Merging the English and the German Upper Model" (Henschel, 1992-3, GMD-IPSI).

This was then further extended to become the initial version of the Generalized Upper Model in 1994 and as described in "The Generalized Upper Model 2.0" [bibtex ps ps.gz]
(John A. Bateman, Renate Henschel, Fabio Rinaldi: 1995).

In May, 2003, there was a revision to update for Loom 3 and 4 and loading independently of the KPML text generator source (Text)