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| - A schematic relation between any entities, e.g. 'the human body has a brain as part', '20th century contains year 1923', 'World War II includes the Pearl Harbour event'.
Subproperties and restrictions can be used to specialize hasPart for objects, events, etc.
- A schematic relation between any entities, e.g. 'the human body has a brain as part', '20th century contains year 1923', 'World War II includes the Pearl Harbour event'.
Parthood should assume the basic properties of mereology: transitivity, antisymmetry, and reflexivity (propert Parthood of course misses reflexivity).
However, antisymmetry is not supported in OWL2 explicitly, therefore DUL has to adopt one of two patterns:
1) dropping asymmetry axioms, while granting reflexivity: this means that symmetry is not enforced, but permitted for the case of reflexivity. Of course, in this way we cannot prevent symmetric usages of hasPart;
2) dropping the reflexivity axiom, and enforce asymmetry: in this case, we would prevent all symmetric usages, but we loose the possibility of enforcing reflexivity, which is commonsensical in parthood.
In DUL, we adopt pattern #1 for partOf, and pattern #2 for properPartOf, which seems a good approximation: due to the lack of inheritance of property characteristics, each asymmetric hasPropertPart assertion would also be a reflexive hasPart assertion (reflexive reduction design pattern).
Subproperties and restrictions can be used to specialize hasPart for objects, events, etc.
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