Efficient web-based navigation of the Foundational Model of Anatomy

The University of Washington's Foundational Model of Anatomy (FMA)1 is a complex, frame-based model composed of over 170,000 frames collectively specified by more than 1.4 million slot values. The Foundational Model Explorer (FME) was designed to provide simple and intuitive web access to this complex knowledge base. The Foundational Model Explorer (FME) (Figure 1) is built upon the Protégé 2000 knowledge base access library [http://protege.stanford.edu/]. The FME application, associated libraries, and the FMA database all reside on remote servers. Users of the FME are not required to download, install, or set-up any of these components. The FME application, in response to a query, retrieves the appropriate information from the FMA, formats these data into html documents, and transmits them, via the Internet, back to the client where they can be viewed from any standard web browser