Abstract:
It is accepted that ontologies are vitally important for interoperability
and information integration. The major part of every ontology
is its taxonomy, a hierarchy of the kind-of relation. A conceptual
relation seldom omitted from ontological considerations of a domain is
the part-of relation. Guarino and Welty provide an ontology of properties
which facilitates dealing with kind-of - we summarise their proposal
from an order-theoretic perspective, and employ it to address part-of
We propose criteria and analyse the resulting classifications of the part-of
relation. The result is a step towards an ontology of part-of.
