Partonomic reasoning as taxonomic reasoning in medicine
Udo Hahn, Stefan Schulz, Martin Romacker · 1999
coling.unl-freiburg.de) imb±. tmi-fre±burg, de/medinf) Taxonomic anatomical knowledge, a major portion of medical ontologies, is fundamentally characterized by is-a and part-whole relations between concepts. While taxonomic reasoning in generalization hierarchies is well-understood, 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, that allows us to fully reduce partonomic reasoning to classification-based taxonomic reasoning.