A theoretical investigation about partwhole semantic relations and its application in Knowledge Organization Systems

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Maurício Barcellos
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Emygdio, Jeanne Louize
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Informação & Informação
• Texto Completo: https://ojs.uel.br/revistas/uel/index.php/informacao/article/view/37988
• topic: Ontologies; Semantic Relationships; Part-whole Relationships; Ontologías; Relaciones Semánticas; Relaciones Parte-todo; Ontologias; Relações Semânticas; Relações Parte-todo

Introduction: Semantic relationships are crucial devices for Knowledge Representation, a field of research that have received more and more attention, mainly with the advent of Semantic Web. Information Science has a long history of studying and using semantic relationships in the several contexts in which Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) are designed and developed. However, there are a few detailed research about the semantic relationship of whole-part, also known as partitive relationship. Objective: This article aims to present a well-grounded description about the partitive relationship, from a interdisciplinary approach including its linguistic and philosophical roots. Methodology: To reach our goals, we describe and characterize two main forms through partitive relations are posed – the meronym, non-formal and linguistic in nature; the mereology, formal and logical in nature – distinguishing them by the property of transitivity. Results: From such distinction, we suggest a pragmatic criterion to decide which approach of partitive relations is suitable to build ontologies and thesauri. Conclusions: We conclude that, formal relationships are, as a matter of fact, more restrict relations, and one can even say that they are included in no-formal relationships. However, the use of formal relations in ontologies requires attention to questions sometimes neglected by information scientists.