Spatial location and its relevance for terminological inferences in bio-ontologies

BACKGROUND: An adequate and expressive ontological representation of biological organisms and their parts requires formal reasoning mechanisms for their relations of physical aggregation and containment. RESULTS: We demonstrate that the proposed formalism allows to deal consistently with "role propagation along non-taxonomic hierarchies", a problem which had repeatedly been identified as an intricate reasoning problem in biomedical ontologies. CONCLUSION: The proposed approach seems to be suitable for the redesign of compositional hierarchies in (bio)medical terminology systems which are embedded into the framework of the OBO (Open Biological Ontologies) Relation Ontology and are using knowledge representation languages developed by the Semantic Web community.