Atomic and Complex Individuals

Meronymy is the semantic relation that holds between a part and the whole. In Computer Science these are often called parthood relations.

The distinction between Atomic Individual (an individual that has no parts) and Complex Individual (an individual that has parts) appears several times in UFO. We have decided to abstract the pattern and model it in a separate diagram, to be used in various parts of UFO.

This diagram represents the basic parthood relations of UFO A: memberOf, subCollectionOf, subQuantityOf and componentOf. We have represented as their superclass a relation called PartOf, between a complex individual and a part of any kind. This relation also is not adherent to the much debated Weak Supplementation, allowing ontologies with different conceptualizations to define new types of parthood relations that do not adhere to weak supplementation. By doing so, one must justify why the conceptualization may do well without weak supplementation. For example, suppose a model of a document, that has parts. Some of these normative documents do not follow the weak supplementation.

This pattern is also applied in UFO C, but we will show each of the applied patterns in a separate diagram