Rough Mereology in Information Systems with Applications to Qualitative Spatial Reasoning

  • Authors:

  • Lech Polkowski;Andrzej Skowron

  • Affiliations:

  • (Correspd.) Department of Mathematics and Information Sciences, Warsaw University of Technology, Pl.Politechniki 1, Warsaw, Poland and Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, Koszykow ...;(Correspd.) Institute of Mathematics, Warsaw University, Banacha 2, 02-097 Warsaw Poland e-mail: skowron@mimuw.edu.pl

  • Venue:
  • Fundamenta Informaticae
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Rough Mereology has been proposed as a paradigm for approximate reasoning in complex information systems. Its primitive notion is that of a predicate of rough inclusion which gives for any two entities of discourse the degree in which one of them is a part of the other. Rough Mereology may be regarded as an extension of Rough Set Theory as it proposes to argue in terms of similarity relations induced from a rough inclusion instead of reasoning in terms of more strict indiscernibility relations. Rough Mereology is also a generalization of Mereology i.e. a theory of reasoning based on the notion of a part. Classical languages of mathematics are of two-fold kind: the language of set theory (naive or formal) expressing classes of objects as sets consisting of ”elements”, ”points” etc. suitable for objects perceived as built of ”atoms” and applied to structures perceived as discrete and the language of part relations suitable for e.g. continuous objects like solids, regions, etc. where two objects are related to each other by saying that one of them is a part of the other. Mereological theories for reasoning about complex structures are at the heart of Qualitative Spatial Reasoning. In this paper, we study basic aspects of Rough Mereology in Information Systems. Mereology makes the distinction between entities perceived as individuals (singletons), to which the part predicate may be applied, and entities perceived as distributive classes (sets, lists, general names etc.) of entities. This distinction is made formal and precise within Ontology i.e. Theory of Being based on the primitive notion of the copula is which is also a basic ingredient of theories for Spatial Reasoning. The practical aim of Ontology is to elaborate a system of concepts (notions, names, sets of entities) about which the reasoning is carried out. Therefore, we begin our study with an analysis of a simple rough set-based Ontology (the template ontology) in Information Systems and in this setting we present our approach to Mereology in Information Systems. In this framework we introduce Rough Mereology and we present some ways for defining rough inclusions. We demonstrate applications of Rough Mereology to approximate reasoning taking as the case subject Qualitative Spatial Reasoning. We address here some of its mereo-topological as well as mereo-geometrical aspects.