The Digital Anatomist
Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA™)

Licensing Information

The Foundational Model of Anatomy - FMA™ - is now available under a source available license. To license and download FMA™, please follow the licensing button.

FAQ on the new FMA™ Ontology License is available.

In response to the increasing demand from the life science and biomedical informatics communities and the private industry for an anatomy ontology that can empower computer applications in biomedicine and provide a basic science framework for the integration of biological data from different sources, the University of Washington and the FMA™ Ontology Research team hereby release the open source license for the Foundational Model of Anatomy - FMA™- ontology.

The FMA™ Ontology License grants licensees a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, copyright license to reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, prepare modifications of, and distribute the FMA™ ontology with or without modifications.

Background Information

Currently containing nearly 70,000 concepts (more than 110,000 terms), the FMA™ represents anatomical entities ranging from biological macromolecules to cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, and major body parts, including the entire body. It improves upon the currently available computable anatomical resources in both detail and scope of represented knowledge. The FMA™ contains anatomical concepts and relationships necessary to model the structure of the entire human body. This knowledge is structured in a form readable not only by humans but by software applications as well. In summary, the FMA™ serves as a reference ontology for biomedical informatics and provides the template for 1) representing the structure of other non-human vertebrate species used as experimental models of human diseases, and 2) for developing ontologies of embryonic development, physiological functions and disease processes.

Technical Details

As a knowledge source, the FMA™ can furnish anatomical knowledge to be included in any "smart" application in the biomedical field that aims to operate at a level that requires inference (i.e., reasoning). There is an emerging need for the development of such applications in a number of fields, including anatomy education, the planning of chemo- and radiation therapy, endoscopic surgery, and many other computer-assisted tasks. Adoption of the FMA™ will improve communication among biomedical applications by standardizing terminology and by providing a common anatomical reference model. The FMA™’s ontological framework also provides the foundation upon which intelligent software applications can rely for reasoning about the structure of the human body.

The FMA™ is a resource for developers of:

• Biomedical ontologies in the basic and clinical sciences
• Experiment management systems in bioinformatics and clinical informatics
• Educational software
• Systems for the management of clinical information
• Biomedical research applications
• Many others — visit the project website to learn more
  

Contact Information

Top of Page