Partonomic Reasoning as Taxonomic Reasoning in Medicine

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Knowledge Representation

The development of powerful, ubiquitous and comprehensive medical ontologies that support formal reasoning on a large scale is one of the key requirements for advanced clinical computing. Taxonomic medical knowledge, a major portion of these ontologies, is fundamentally characterized by is-a and part-whole relationships between concepts. While reasoning in generalization hierarchies is a well-understood process, no fully conclusive mechanism as yet exists for partonomic reasoning. We here propose a new representation construct for part-whole relations based on the formal framework of description logics, i.e., the well-known concept language ALC, and show how part-whole reasoning can naturally be emulated via classification-based reasoning without extending the expressiveness of the underlying terminological system.