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Toward Understanding Whole-Part Relations

In another blog post I mentioned whole-part relations. With the help of some others I have come across some additional resources for understanding whole-part relations.  Here is a summary of those resources:

  • A Taxonomy of Part-Whole Relations: I mentioned this resource in another blog post. Basically, this paper points out that part-whole relations can be broken out into different groups:
    • component-integral object: for example (pedal – bike)
    • member-collection: for example (ship – fleet)
    • portion-mass: for example (slice – pie)
    • stuff-object: for example (steel – car)
    • feature-activity: for example (paying – shopping)
    • place-area: for example (Everglades – Florida)
  • Mereology: Mereology is the theory of parthood relations: of the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) This is a pretty technical piece, but it does help understand the moving parts of whole-part relations.
  • Knowledge Representation in the Social Semantic Web:
  • Parts and Momements: Study in Logic and Formal Ontology: (Wholes, Parts, and the Objectivity of Knowledge)
  • Parts and Wholes in Semantics: This book develops a unified account of expressions involving the notions of "part" and "whole" in which principles of the individuation of part structures play a central role. Moltmann presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as as a whole, together, and alone, nominal and adverbial quantifiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as completely and partly. She develops a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions.
  • A Theory of Parts and Boundaries: Fairly technical.

That is a lot of information, I have not digested it all yet.  Basically, there is a lot to whole-part relations.

Posted on Tuesday, January 20, 2015 at 10:50AM by Registered CommenterCharlie | CommentsPost a Comment

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