Mereotopological reasoning about parts and (w)holes in bio-ontologies
Stefan Schulz, Udo Hahn · 2001
We here deal with mereotopological properties of parts and associated wholes, locations and empty spaces (holes), with particular reference to biological structures. Our considerations lead to a basic ontology which contains 'solid object', 'hole' and 'boundary' as mutually disjoint primitives. Formally, we embed the relations 'part-of' and 'location-of' into a parsimonious description logic (ALC) and emulate partonomic and spatial reasoning involving these relations by terminological subsumption. In contrast to common conceptualizations, we do not distinguish between solids and the regions they occupy, as well as we allow solids to have holes as proper parts. In order to support these modeling decisions, we discuss various concrete examples from human anatomy.