The digital anatomist foundational model: principles for defining and structuring its concept domain.

We define a foundational model as an abstraction of a body of knowledge that explicitly declares the principles and concepts necessary for coherently and consistently modelling a knowledge domain. Principles for a foundational model of anatomy are defined and used to specify the components of such a model. These components include an anatomy ontology (Ao), an anatomical structural abstraction (ASA), an anatomical transformation abstraction (ATA) and metaknowledge (Mk), which comprises the rules for representing relationships in the other three components of the model. The foundational model Fm is therefore specified as the four-tuple Fm = (Ao,ASA,ATA,Mk). We hypothesize that this abstraction captures the information that is sufficient and necessary for describing the anatomy of any physical entity that constitutes the body, as well as that of the body itself.