Although a partitive relation seems to be familiar to us, its characteristics and issues are not well discussed. This paper, first of all, shows disciplines that deal with generic, partitive (whole-part), and associative relations as well as approaches taken to utilize them in those disciplines. Then, general characteristics of the relations are described that are unique to the disciplines, in particular, terminology and the thesauri in information retrieval.
On the base of the preceding discussions this paper examines the characteristics and issues of the partitive relation in terminology and the thesauri. In terminology where the relation is introduced for easier understanding of concepts it is clarified that specifying it is difficult and confusion between onomasiological and semasiological approaches is unavoidable. In terms of the thesauri whose aim is to augment retrieval performance, it is indicated that the relation is not essential and introduced tactically. It is also shown that the distinction between generic and partitive relations is vague.
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