Foundational Model of Anatomy

The Foundational Model of Anatomy Ontology (FMA) is an evolving computer-based knowledge source for biomedical informatics; it is concerned with the representation of classes or types and relationships necessary for the symbolic representation of the phenotypic structure of the human body in a form that is understandable to humans and is also navigable, parseable and interpretable by machine-based systems. Specifically, the FMA is a domain ontology that represents a coherent body of explicit declarative knowledge about human anatomy. Its ontological framework can be applied and extended to all other species.

The Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) ontology is one of the information resources integrated in the distributed framework of the Anatomy Information System developed and maintained by the Structural Informatics Group at the University of Washington. The FMA is open source. See Summary of FMA Resources below for information about obtaining and accessing the FMA, posting issues, requesting content changes, etc. Some of the topics after the summary are currently out of date.