A Diagrammatic Representation for Entities and Mereotopological Relations in Ontologies

In the graphical representation of ontologies, it is customary to use graph theory as the representational background. We claim here that the standard graph-based approach has a number of limitations. We focused here on a problem in the graph-based representation of ontologies in complex domains such as biomedical, engineering and manufacturing: lack of mereotopological representation. Based on such limitation, we proposed a diagrammatic way to represent entity’s structure and other forms of mereotopological relationships between the entities. The experiments we carried out indicate we achieved the expected benefits.