A conceptual theory of part-whole relations and its applications

This paper shows two applications of a theory of part-whole relations that has been introduced in 1] in two different areas: natural language semantics and modelling parts of physical objects. A short overview of the theory will be given, followed by two sections which present results in the two application areas. In Section 2 we provide an analysis of the domain of solid objects like devices, buildings and other artifacts of our daily life. We first examine in more detail the relevant part-whole relations in that domain. The second part describes how these relations can be represented and manipulated in a hybrid system. In Section 3 it will be shown that there is a strong and immediate correspondence between classes of part-whole-relations and syntactically or lexically motivated classes of genitive constructions. The two applications illustrate the generality of the theory as well as its usefulness for representing and reasoning about part-whole information in totally different domains.