These definitions or concepts seem to be primary elements of the BFO Foundational Model of Anatomy

They seem to be stand-alone definitions -- though probably they are analyzed of defined in detail somewhere.

S, the question from my point of view of view of synthetic dimensionality -- is:

how are each of these semantic structures defined by dimensionality

How do we say that "this thing is a that" -- that this object X is defined by values in N dimensions

There are hundreds (thousands) of specific anatomical objects, each one with identifying characteristics

More or less in the form -- I think -- of "X attaches to Y"

X is a systematic part of Y

X is a regional part of Y

http://www.ontobee.org/ontology/catalog/FMA?iri=http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl%23ObjectProperty

attaches_to

bounds

branch_of

constitutional_part_of

part_of

- part_of - constitutional_part_of - regional_part_of - systemic_part_of

regional_part_of

systemic_part_of

class hierarchy

Thing + Anatomical entity + Physical anatomical entity + Material anatomical entity + Anatomical structure + Organ system - Alimentary system - Nervous system - Respiratory system + Urinary system + Genital system - Cardiovascular system - Integumentary system - Musculoskeletal system - Deep fascial system

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https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-84628-885-2_4

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) ontology 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.

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Thu, Apr 1, 2021