Schulz Stefan, Hahn Udo
Department of Medical Informatics, Freiburg University Hospital, Stefan-Meier-Str. 26, D-79104 Freiburg, Germany.
Artif Intell Med. 2005 Jul;34(3):179-200. doi: 10.1016/j.artmed.2004.11.005.
Biomedical ontologies are typically structured in a biaxial way, reflecting both a taxonomic (is-a) and a partonomic (part-of) hierarchy. Commonly used biomedical terminologies, which incorporate such distinctions excel in terms of broad coverage but lack a rigid formal foundation. The latter, however, is a prerequisite for automated reasoning. For the biomedical domain, it is not only crucial to cope with ontological dependencies between wholes and their parts but also with specific reasoning patterns which underlie the propagation of roles across partonomic hierarchies.
We scale down part-whole reasoning to subsumption-based taxonomic reasoning within the formal framework of a parsimonious variant of description logics (viz. ALC).
We provide a formal basis for ontological engineering in the domain of biomedicine, as far as part-whole relationships are concerned, by addressing typical reasoning patterns encountered in this domain.
生物医学本体通常以双轴方式构建，反映分类学（是-a）和部分学（部分-of）层次结构。常用的生物医学术语包含此类区分，在广泛覆盖方面表现出色，但缺乏严格的形式基础。然而，后者是自动推理的先决条件。对于生物医学领域而言，不仅要处理整体与其部分之间的本体依赖关系，还要处理跨部分学层次结构传播角色所依据的特定推理模式。
我们在描述逻辑（即ALC）的简约变体的形式框架内，将部分-整体推理缩小为基于包含的分类推理。
就部分-整体关系而言，我们通过解决该领域中遇到的典型推理模式，为生物医学领域的本体工程提供了形式基础。
