Computational ontologies of parthood, componenthood, and containment
Thomas Bittner, Maureen P. Donnelly · 2005
Parthood, componenthood, and containment relations are commonly assumed in biomedical ontologies and terminology systems, but are not usually clearly distinguished from another. This paper contributes towards a unified theory of parthood, componenthood, and containment relations. Our goal in this is to clarify distinctions between these relations as well as principles governing their interrelations. We first develop a theory of these relations in first order predicate logic and then discuss how description logics can be used to capture some important aspects of the first order theory. 1