An Ontological Engineering Methodology for Part-Whole Reasoning in Medicine

Contents

Part-whole relationships are fundamental ontological categories for medical reasoning. Part-whole modeling, however, still provides no conclusive methodology for adequate representations. We propose a new representation construct for part-whole reasoning based on the formal framework of description logics, thereby overcoming problems that arise in the context of previous formal approaches to part-whole modeling, as well as widely spread comprehensive medical terminologies.