(For membership information, consult our web page) The material herein is copyrighted material. It may not be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from AAAI.

There is a subtle risk of ambiguity in the choice between concepts and roles forced by current KL-ONE-like languages, since many roles may be concepts as well. In this paper we explore the ontological foundations of the role/concept relationship, and analyze its implications on the practice of knowledge engineering. We criticize the current interpretation of KL-ONE roles as arbitrary relations, which vanishes their original meaning and makes them identical to slots. We suggest to call attributes those concepts which actually act as conceptual components, and propose a formal semantics which binds these concepts to their corresponding relations.

. Collective entities and collective relations play an important role in natural language. In order to capture the full meaning of sentences like "The Beatles sing `Yesterday' ", a knowledge representation language should be able to express and reason about plural entities -- like "the Beatles" -- and their relationships -- like "sing" -- with any possible reading (cumulative, distributive or collective). In this paper a way of including collections and collective relations within a concept language, chosen as the formalism for representing the semantics of sentences, is presented. A twofold extension of the ALC concept language is investigated : (1) special relations introduce collective entities either out of their components or out of other collective entities, (2) plural quantifiers on collective relations specify their possible reading. The formal syntax and semantics of the concept language is given, together with a sound and complete algorithm to compute satisfiability and subs...

The need for a sharable resource that can provide deep anatomical knowledge and support inference for biomedical applications has recently been the driving force in the creation of biomedical ontologies. Previous attempts at the symbolic representation of anatomical relationships necessary for such ontologies have been largely limited to general partonomy and class subsumption. We propose an ontology of anatomical relationships beyond class assignments and generic part-whole relations and illustrate the inheritance of structural attributes in the Digital Anatomist Foundational Model of Anatomy. Our purpose is to generate a symbolic model that accommodates all structural relationships and physical properties required to comprehensively and explicitly describe the physical organization of the human body.

this paper is that, therefore, clinical terminologies are now software and that this fact has profound implications for how they are designed, compiled and maintained

In this paper we extend the ODMG object data model with composite objects. A composite object is an object built by aggregating other component objects. Exclusiveness and dependency constraints, as well as referential integrity, can be associated with composition relationships among objects. Our composite object model is developed in the framework of the ODMG object database standard data model, but can be used in both object-oriented and object-relational database systems. In the paper, we propose a language for defining composite objects and we define the semantics of update operations on composite objects. Keywords Object-oriented database systems, composite objects, integrity constraints, data models. INTRODUCTION Object-oriented DBMS (OODBMS) and object-relational DBMS (ORDBMS) are establishing themselves as the new generation DBMS. Object database systems overcome the limitations of relational systems with respect to several emerging data-intensive applications because of thei...

There is a subtle risk of ambiguity in the choice between concepts and roles forced by current KL-ONE-like languages, since many roles may be concepts as well. In this paper we explore the ontological foundations of the role/concept relationship, and analyze its implications on the practice of knowledge engineering. We criticize the current interpretation of KL-ONE roles as arbitrary relations, which vanishes their original meaning and makes them identical to slots. We suggest to call attributes those concepts which actually act as conceptual components, and propose a formal semantics which binds these concepts to their corresponding relations. Keywords: knowledge representation, terminological logics, knowledge engineering, knowledge acquisition, formal ontology, KL-ONE