title: Towards the ontological foundations of symbolic biological theories.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Support for the symbolic representation of the physical structure of living organisms by an ontologically solid and logically sound foundation as a basis for formal reasoning.
  
  
  METHODS
  A set of canonical relations and attributes necessary for empirically adequate descriptions of biological entities is proposed.
  
  
  RESULTS
  It is shown how a broad range of biological organisms and their parts can be represented by cascading theories which are ordered by the dimensions of granularity, development, species, and canonicity.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proposed representation of biological objects is non-redundant and compatible with inter- and intra-species similarities, developmental stages and pathological deviations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Freiburg University Hospital, Stefan-Meier-Strasse 26, 79104 Freiburg, Germany. stschulz@uni-freiburg.de
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Schulz
authors.forename: Udo
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Hahn
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000379:methods*; D019295:Computational Biology; D003663:Decision Trees; D048788:Growth and Development; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D010336:Pathology; D012660:Semantics; D013045:Species Specificity; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled