Parthood as Spatial Inclusion—Evidence from Biomedical Conceptualizations

Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference (KR2004)

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Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference (KR2004)

Contents

Modeling complex compositional objects in the field of the life sciences requires to solve intricate ontological problems, especially those related to parts of a whole, space and location. For concrete physical entities, we here stipulate that the distinction between parthood and location can be abstracted away. We outline a logic based reasoning framework in which taxonomic subsumption not only takes care of the propagation of roles across taxonomic hierarchies, but also across nontaxonomic, i.e., partonomic or spatial, ones.