Fig. 3

Characterization of a process concept by relations to concepts under ‘continuant’ class. We take ‘invasion of bacteria to soft tissue’ as an example. The process is characterized by 10 kinds of concepts subsumed by ‘continuant’ class with relations such as ‘located_in’, ‘has_participant’, ‘has_active_agent’, ‘has_suppressive_agent’. These relations illustrate that the process of ‘invasion of bacteria to soft tissue’ occurs in gingiva and periodontal ligaments containing B-lymphocytes, phagocytes, and microorganisms, actively regulated by bacterial outer membrane proteins, endopeptidase, and histamine, as well as systemic disease of diabetes, and suppressed by drugs for periodontitis. Every relation is annotated by a reference paper reporting on a reason of the relation