The qualitative and time-dependent character of spatial relations in biomedical ontologies

摘要

Motivation: The formal representation of mereological aspects of canonical anatomy (parthood relations) is relatively well understood. The formal representation of other aspects of canonical anatomy, such as connectedness and adjacency relations between anatomical parts, their shape and size as well as the spatial arrangement of anatomical parts within larger anatomical structures are, however, much less well understood and represented in existing computational anatomical and bio-medical ontologies only insufficiently.