Symbolic modeling of structural relationships in the Foundational Model of Anatomy

Mejino, Jose L V and Rosse, Cornelius (2004) Symbolic modeling of structural relationships in the Foundational Model of Anatomy. In Proceedings, First International Workshop on Formal Biomedical Knowledge Representation (KR-MED 2004), Whistler Mountain, Canada. To appear.

Abstract

The need for a sharable resource that can provide deep anatomical knowledge and support inference for biomedical applications has recently been the driving force in the creation of biomedical ontologies. Previous attempts at the symbolic representation of anatomical relationships necessary for such ontologies have been largely limited to general partonomy and class subsumption. We propose an ontology of anatomical relationships beyond class assignments and generic part-whole relations and illustrate the inheritance of structural attributes in the Digital Anatomist Foundational Model of Anatomy. Our purpose is to generate a symbolic model that accommodates all structural relationships and physical properties required to comprehensively and explicitly describe the physical organization of the human body.