Specifying Well-Formed Part-Whole Relations in Coq

International audienceIn the domain of ontology design as well as in Conceptual Modeling, representing part-whole relations is a long-standing challenging problem. However, in most papers the focus has been on properties of the part-whole relation, rather than on its semantics. In the last decades, most approaches which have addressed the formal specification of the part-whole relation (i) rely on First Order Logic (FOL) which is unable to address multiple levels of granularity and (ii) do not support any typing mechanism useful for the extensional side of concepts and then, many difficulties remain especially about expressiveness. In mathematical logic and program checking, type theories have proved to be appealing but so far, they have not been applied in the formalization of ontological relations. To bridge this gap, we present an axiomatization of the part-whole relation which hold between typed terms. Relation structures in the dependently-typed framework rely on a constructive logic. We define in a precise way what relation structures and their meta-properties, are in term of type classes using the Coq language