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We propose a modular ontology of the dynamic features of reality. This amounts, on the one hand, to a purely spatial ontology supporting snapshot views of the world at successive instants of time and, on the other hand, to a purely spatiotemporal ontology of change and process. We argue that dynamic spatial ontology must combine these two distinct types of inventory of the entities and relationships in reality, and we provide characterizations of spatiotemporal reasoning in the light of the interconnections between them.

Abstract. We propose a modular formal ontology of the biomedical domain with two components, one for biological objects, corresponding broadly to anatomy, and one for biological processes, corresponding broadly to physiology. The result constitutes what might be described as a joint venture between two perspectives – of

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this paper argues for the rich world of representation that lies between these two extremes." Levesque and Brachman (1985) 1 Introduction Time and space belong to those few fundamental concepts that always puzzled scholars from almost all scientific disciplines, gave endless themes to science fiction writers, and were of vital concern to our everyday life and commonsense reasoning. So whatever approach to AI one takes [ Russell and Norvig, 1995 ] , temporal and spatial representation and reasoning will always be among its most important ingredients (cf. [ Hayes, 1985 ] ). Knowledge representation (KR) has been quite successful in dealing separately with both time and space. The spectrum of formalisms in use ranges from relatively simple temporal and spatial databases, in which data are indexed by temporal and/or spatial parameters (see e.g. [ Srefik, 1995; Worboys, 1995 ] ), to much more sophisticated numerical methods developed in computational geom

The need for spatial representations and spatial reasoning is ubiquitous in AI – from robot planning and navigation, to interpreting visual inputs, to understanding natural language – in all these cases the need to represent and reason about spatial aspects of the world is of key importance. Related fields of research, such as geographic information science

Abstract. We argue for the usefulness of abductive reasoning in the context of ontologies. We discuss several applicaton scenarios in which various forms of abduction would be useful, introduce corresponding abductive reasoning tasks, give examples, and begin to develop the formal apparatus needed to employ abductive inference in expressive description logics. 1

Objective: The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how a formal spatial theory can be used as an important tool for disambiguating the spatial information embodied in biomedical ontologies and for enhancing their automatic reasoning capabilities. Method and Materials: This paper presents a formal theory of parthood and location relations among individuals, called Basic Inclusion Theory (BIT). Since biomedical ontologies are comprised of assertions about classes of individuals (rather than assertions about individuals), we define parthood and location relations among classes in the extended theory BIT+Cl (Basic Inclusion Theory for Classes). We then demonstrate the usefulness of this formal theory for making the logical structure of spatial information more precise in two ontologies concerned with human anatomy: the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) and GALEN. Results: We find that in both the FMA and GALEN, class-level spatial relations with different logical properties are not always explicitly distinguished. As a result, the spatial information included in these biomedical ontologies is often ambiguous and the possibilities for implementing consistent automatic reasoning within or across ontologies are limited. Conclusion: Precise formal characterizations of all spatial relations assumed by a biomedical ontology are necessary

Current ontologies' upper-level taxonomic structure is often quite complicated and hard to understand. In this paper I show how the theoretical tools of so-called Formal Ontology, and especially the theory of identity, can help to formulate cleaner, more general, more rigorous, and more understandable upper-level ontologies. I focus in particular on some examples of multiple generalization, proposing a way of simplifying the domain structure by splitting some concepts according to different identity conditions, or by excluding them because of their limited organizational role.

Sponsor: ESC Contract No.: FA9721-04-0001