Part-whole relations in object-centered systems: an overview
Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special issue on modeling parts and wholes
Analysis of part-whole relation and subsumption in the medical domain
Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special issue on modeling parts and wholes
Partonomic reasoning as taxonomic reasoning in medicine
AAAI '99/IAAI '99 Proceedings of the sixteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence and the eleventh Innovative applications of artificial intelligence conference innovative applications of artificial intelligence
The description logic handbook
Decidability of SHIQ with complex role inclusion axioms
IJCAI'03 Proceedings of the 18th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence
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Biomedical ontologies are typically structured in a biaxial way, reflecting both a taxonomic and a mereological order. Common examples such as the Gene Ontology and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) excel in terms of coverage but lack an adequate semantics of the mereological relations they incorporate. This shortcoming is particularly evident as far as the (non-)mandatory existence of parts for their wholes is cOllcerned, on the one hand, and the propagation of properties acmss part-whole hierarchies, on the other hand. We provide a formal specification of the semantic foundations of mereology in the biomedical domain that is closely linked to the paradigm of description logics. In essence, we here propose to emulate mereological reasoning by taxonomic reasoning. In an attempt to capture much of the shared intuition underlying merelogical reasoning in the biomedical domain, we distinguish for each mereologically relevant concept four different classes of parts and wholes which allow for the expression of five different propagation patterns.