A language for the human body: a tentative proposal

To rigorously describe the structure of the human body a rich formal language is needed: this language must be able to describe all the parts of the body and the spatial regions those parts occupy; moreover, it must be able to describe the relations that occur between those parts and those spatial regions; finally, it must be able to distinguish between essential and contingent features of the body and it must do so based on the context that is relevant for the descriptions given. Our aim in this paper is to provide a formal language that can express all those kinds of information. The language we present is inspired by Vakarelov (2008) and is a modally augmented version of the discrete mereotopology due to Galton (2014) with an added relation for location (this latter addition is inspired by Donnelly (2004)): we will call this language modal discrete mereotopology with location. In the paper, we also suggest a neighbourhood semantics for our language: this will make the language context-sensitive, making it fit for different computer graphics applications.