Part-Whole Relations in Object-Role Models

Abstract

Abstract. Representing parthood relations in ORM has received little attention, despite its added-value of the semantics at the conceptual level. We introduce a high-level taxonomy of types of meronymic and mereological relations, use it to construct a decision procedure to determine which type of part-whole role is applicable, and incrementally add mandatory and uniqueness constraints. This enables the conceptual modeller to develop models that are closer to the real-world subject domain semantics, hence improve quality of the software.

The Use of Foundational Ontologies in Ontology Development: An Empirical Assessment

“…For both cases, however, a new solution to the issue of choosing the appropriate part-whole relation is required. This may be achieved by automating the decision diagram in [24] extended with a 'cheat sheet' with examples and informal definitions for each of the foundational ontology's main categories (alike Table 1 …”

Positionalism of Relations and Its Consequences for Fact-Oriented Modelling

“…In this context, we mean both the reuse of fragments across conceptual data models and the reuse of relationships within one conceptual model. The latter has its counterpart in UML class diagrams as stereotyped associations, whereas within FOM the reuse of different types of part-whole relationships has been proposed [13]. Forcing this into the standard view means imposing the use of precisely those names for the verbalisation, but this could create artificial debates: when a domain expert insists that something must be made of something else and does not like constituted of, there really is no debate about the meaning of the relation but only about the terms used.…”

Representing Mereotopological Relations in OWL Ontologies with OntoPartS

“…An activity diagram for the selection process of the mereotopological relations is available in the online supplementary material. The selection of the appropriate relation incorporates some previous ideas of a decision diagram and topological principles as an extension of mereological theories [25,7,8], and questions and decision points have been added to reflect the extended taxonomy. For the mereotopological relations considered, in principle, the decision for the appropriate one can be made in two separate ways: either find mereotopological relations and then asking to distinguish between located in and contained in, or vv.…”