The Foundational Model of Anatomy Ontology

Rosse, Cornelius and Mejino, Jose L V (2008) The Foundational Model of Anatomy Ontology. In: Anatomy Ontologies for Bioinformatics: Principles and Practice. Springer pp. 59-117.

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Abstract

Anatomy is the structure of biological organisms. The term also denotes the scientific
discipline devoted to the study of anatomical entities and the structural and
developmental relations that obtain among these entities during the lifespan of an
organism. Anatomical entities are the independent continuants of biomedical reality on
which physiological and disease processes depend, and which, in response to etiological
agents, can transform themselves into pathological entities. For these reasons, hard copy
and in silico information resources in virtually all fields of biology and medicine, as a
rule, make extensive reference to anatomical entities. Because of the lack of a
generalizable, computable representation of anatomy, developers of computable
terminologies and ontologies in clinical medicine and biomedical research represented
anatomy from their own more or less divergent viewpoints. The resulting heterogeneity
presents a formidable impediment to correlating human anatomy not only across
computational resources but also with the anatomy of model organisms used in
biomedical experimentation. The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) is being
developed to fill the need for a generalizable anatomy ontology, which can be used and
adapted by any computer-based application that requires anatomical information.
Moreover it is evolving into a standard reference for divergent views of anatomy and a
template for representing the anatomy of animals. A distinction is made between the FMA
ontology as a theory of anatomy and the implementation of this theory as the FMA
artifact. In either sense of the term, the FMA is a spatial-structural ontology of the
entities and relations which together form the phenotypic structure of the human
organism at all biologically salient levels of granularity. Making use of explicit
ontological principles and sound methods, it is designed to be understandable by human
beings and navigable by computers. The FMA�s ontological structure provides for
machine-based inference, enabling powerful computational tools of the future to reason
with biomedical data.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Foundational Model Anatomy Ontology Bioinformatics FMA
Subjects:	All Projects > Foundational Model of Anatomy
Depositing User:	Jim Brinkley
Date Deposited:	23 Mar 2007
Last Modified:	14 Jan 2022 19:37
URI:	http://sigpubs.si.washington.edu/id/eprint/204

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