Part-Whole Reasoning in Medical Knowledge Bases Using Description Logics

The development of powerful, ubiquitous and comprehensive medical ontologies that support formal reasoning on a large scale is one of the key requirements for clinical computing. Taxonomic medical knowledge, a major portion of these ontologies, is fundamentally characterized by is—a and part-whole relationships between concepts. While reasoning in generalization hierarchies is a well-understood process, no fully conclusive mechanism yet exists for part-whole reasoning. We here propose a new representation construct for part-whole relations based on the formal framework of description logics, i.e. the well-known concept language ALC, and show how part-whole reasoning can naturally be emulated via classification-based reasoning without extending the expressiveness of the underlying terminological system.

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