Purpose: Research in knowledge and ontology engineering is experiencing an ongoing effort to extend Conceptual Modeling (CM) to Meta-Level Modeling (MLM). The goal is to achieve greater expressiveness, lower memory requirements and less complex models with a minimal set of modeling elements. Methodology: In this paper, we present an extended approach to MLM. It is based on a category system of four different types of Data Properties (DP). With the O4Top ontology blueprint, we propose a schema that provides a foundation for both conceptual and meta-level modeling. It supports the formalization of structural hierarchies for classes, relationship types and attributes. Findings: The proposed category system of data properties meets the requirements of meta-level modeling. Instead of using potency to control the length of the instantiation chains, the data property type determines how far an attribute value can be propagated through an inheritance hierarchy. This supports the streamlining of ontologies and their terminologies. Originality: To our best knowledge no other approach for metal-level modeling is founded on a category system of data properties. The naming conventions for ontological elements encode element types with little syntactic overhead and serve to disambiguate the names of the modeling elements.