Parthood as spatial inclusion: Evidence from biomedical conceptualizations

Modeling complex compositional objects in the field of the life sciences requires to solve intricate ontological problems, especially those related to parts of a whole, space and location. For concrete physical entities, we here stipulate that the distinction between parthood and location can be abstracted away. We outline a logic-based reasoning framework in which taxonomic sub-sumption not only takes care of the propagation of roles across taxonomic hierarchies, but also across nontaxo-nomic, i.e., partonomic or spatial, ones