Architectural approach for providing relations in biomedical terminologies and ontologies.

The representation of multiple relations is one of the main criteria of ontologies. In formalizing both ontologies and terminologies in biomedicine relations are used to code axioms for the classes of the ontology. However, a huge number of relations represented in medical ontologies and terminologies are derived from language and formal definition is omitted. We present a strategy based on an architectural approach to facility formal analysis of relations for use in ontology systems in biomedicine and in general.