Bidirectional mereological reasoning in anatomical knowledge bases

Abstract

Mereological relationships--relationships between parts and wholes--are essential for ontological engineering in the anatomical domain. We propose a knowledge engineering approach that emulates mereological reasoning by taxonomic reasoning based on SEP triplets, a special data structure for the encoding of part-whole relations, which is fully embedded in the formal framework of standard description logics. We extend the SEP formalism in order to account not only for the part-of but also for the has-part relation, both being considered transitive in our domain. Furthermore we analyze the distinction between the ontological primitives singletons, collections and mass concepts in the anatomy domain and sketch how reasoning about these kinds of concepts can be accounted for in a knowledge representation language, using the extended SEP formalism.