Computational ontologies of parthood, componenthood, and containment

Parthood, componenthood, and containment relations are commonly assumed in biomedical ontologies and terminology systems, but are not usually clearly distinguished from another. This paper contributes towards a unified theory of parthood, componenthood, and containment relations. Our goal in this is to clarify distinctions between these relations as well as principles governing their interrelations. We first develop a theory of these relations in first order predicate logic and then discuss how description logics can be used to capture some important aspects of the first order theory.