Pushing the FMA-OWL enveloppe further

Representing the Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA) in OWL 2 W3C standard, is essential for its interoperability with other biomedical ontologies, its design, maintenance, and quality insurance. The paper describes the method and ‘FMA-OWLizer’ tool that moves the FMA to OWL 2. One main strength of the approach is to leverage OWL expressiveness to explicit some implicit semantics and naming conventions of the FMA, meanwhile improving its ontological model and fixing some FMA errors. Another originality is the flexibility and versatility of the conversion: many options allow for producing several FMA-OWL variants customized to users, e.g., choosing a frame or OWL source, generating an OWL DL or OWL 2, a full or reduced FMA target, configuring the classes definitions etc. Thus several new FMA-OWL ontologies are available. To the best of our knowledge, no complete representation of the entire FMA in OWL DL or OWL 2 existed so far.