Representing Mereological Relations in Weighted Description Logics

Perceptron operators have been recently introduced in Description Logics: they define a concept by listing features of the concept together with associated weights, as well as a threshold that needs to be reached to classify an individual as a member of the defined concept. These formal operators have been shown to be useful in simplifying the representation of complex classifications and for defining combinations of concepts. In this paper, we discuss how perceptron operators can provide a tool to capture some of the complex relationships that arise in the conceptual use and definition of a variety of mereological relations. We here study the use case of the concept of “bike” as a mereologically/structurally complex object, analyse the most relevant difficulties that emerge from the modelling approach using percepton operators, and propose several starting points to overcome these difficulties.