Readings in nonmonotonic reasoning
Readings in nonmonotonic reasoning
Mereotopology: a theory of parts and boundaries
Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special issue on modeling parts and wholes
Mereotopological reasoning about parts and (w)holes in bio-ontologies
Proceedings of the international conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems - Volume 2001
Pushing the envelope: challenges in a frame-based representation of human anatomy
Data & Knowledge Engineering
A reference ontology for biomedical informatics: the foundational model of anatomy
Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Special issue: Unified medical language system
Toward a geometry of common sense: a semantics and a complete axiomatization of mereotopology
IJCAI'95 Proceedings of the 14th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
A formal theory for reasoning about parthood, connection, and location
Artificial Intelligence
Biomedical ontologies: what part-of is and isn't
Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Special issue: Biomedical ontologies
Strategies for referent tracking in electronic health records
Journal of Biomedical Informatics - Special issue: Biomedical ontologies
Logical properties of foundational relations in bio-ontologies
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
Referent tracking for Digital Rights Management
International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies
Fuzzy spatial relation ontology for image interpretation
Fuzzy Sets and Systems
Metamodeling integration architecture for open biomedical ontologies: the GO extensions' case study
ER '07 Tutorials, posters, panels and industrial contributions at the 26th international conference on Conceptual modeling - Volume 83
Spatial reasoning in a fuzzy region connection calculus
Artificial Intelligence
Against Idiosyncrasy in Ontology Development
Proceedings of the 2006 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (FOIS 2006)
A spatio-temporal ontology for geographic information integration
International Journal of Geographical Information Science
From top-level to domain ontologies: ecosystem classifications as a case study
COSIT'07 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Spatial information theory
Using an ECG reference ontology for semantic interoperability of ECG data
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
Spatial relations between classes of individuals
COSIT'05 Proceedings of the 2005 international conference on Spatial Information Theory
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Objective: The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how a formal spatial theory can be used as an important tool for disambiguating the spatial information embodied in biomedical ontologies and for enhancing their automatic reasoning capabilities. Method and materials: This paper presents a formal theory of parthood and location relations among individuals, called Basic Inclusion Theory (BIT). Since biomedical ontologies are comprised of assertions about classes of individuals (rather than assertions about individuals), we define parthood and location relations among classes in the extended theory Basic Inclusion Theory for Classes (BIT+Cl). We then demonstrate the usefulness of this formal theory for making the logical structure of spatial information more precise in two ontologies concerned with human anatomy: the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) and GALEN. Results: We find that in both the FMA and GALEN, class-level spatial relations with different logical properties are not always explicitly distinguished. As a result, the spatial information included in these biomedical ontologies is often ambiguous and the possibilities for implementing consistent automatic reasoning within or across ontologies are limited. Conclusion: Precise formal characterizations of all spatial relations assumed by a biomedical ontology are necessary to ensure that the information embodied in the ontology can be fully and coherently utilized in a computational environment. This paper can be seen as an important beginning step toward achieving this goal, but much more work along these lines is required.