A Visual Representation of Part-Whole Relationships in BFO-Conformant Ontologies

In the graphical representation of ontologies, in particular for part_whole relationships, 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, and because of that we propose a better way to represent part_whole structures for ontologies developed in accordance with the Basic Formal Ontology, one that will reduce visual pollution and ground part_whole on a more rigorous visual representation. The experiments we carried out indicate we achieved the stated benefits and that the proposed representation is useful for the development of information systems in general and in particular for biomedical systems and applications.