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Part-whole reasoning in medical knowledge bases using description logics

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KI-98: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (KI 1998)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1504))

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Abstract

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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Linguistische Informatik/Computerlinguistik, Universität Freiburg, Werthmannplatz 1, D-79085, Freiburg

    Stefan Schulz, Martin Romacker & Udo Hahn

  2. Abteilung Medizinische Informatik, Universitätsklinikum Freiburg, Stefan-Meier-Str. 26, D-79104, Freiburg

    Stefan Schulz & Martin Romacker

Authors
  1. Stefan Schulz
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  2. Martin Romacker
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  3. Udo Hahn
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Otthein Herzog Andreas Günter

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Schulz, S., Romacker, M., Hahn, U. (1998). Part-whole reasoning in medical knowledge bases using description logics. In: Herzog, O., Günter, A. (eds) KI-98: Advances in Artificial Intelligence. KI 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1504. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095443

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0095443

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65080-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49656-4

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