title: Modeling anatomical spatial relations with description logics.
abstract: Although spatial relations are essential for the anatomy domain, spatial reasoning is only weakly supported by medical knowledge representation systems. To remedy this shortcoming we express spatial relations that can intuitively be applied to anatomical objects (such as 'disconnected', 'externally connected', 'partial overlap' and 'proper part') within the formal framework of description logics. A special encoding of concept descriptions (in terms of SEP triplets) allows us to emulate spatial reasoning by classification-based reasoning.
authors.affiliation: Freiburg University, Text Knowledge Engineering Lab.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schulz
authors.forename: U
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Hahn
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Romacker
mesh_terms: D000715:Anatomy / Q000145:classification*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008128:Logic; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D009626:Terminology as Topic