title: The qualitative and time-dependent character of spatial relations in biomedical ontologies.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The formal representation of mereological aspects of canonical anatomy (parthood relations) is relatively well understood. The formal representation of other aspects of canonical anatomy, such as connectedness and adjacency relations between anatomical parts, their shape and size as well as the spatial arrangement of anatomical parts within larger anatomical structures are, however, much less well understood and represented in existing computational anatomical and bio-medical ontologies only insufficiently.
  
  
  RESULTS
  In this article, we provide a methodology of how to incorporate this kind of information into anatomical and bio-medical ontologies by applying techniques of representing qualitative spatial information from Artificial Intelligence. In particular, we focus on how to explicitly take into account the qualitative and time-dependent character of these relations. As a running example, we use the human temporomandibular joint (TMJ).
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Using the presented methodology, a formal ontology was developed which is accessible on http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/fol. This ontology may help to improve the logical and ontological rigor of bio-medical ontologies such as the OBO relation ontology.
authors.affiliation: Department of Philosophy, University at Buffalo, USA. bittner3@buffalo.edu
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Bittner
authors.forename: Louis J
authors.initials: LJ
authors.lastname: Goldberg
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000715:Anatomy / Q000145:classification* / Q000379:methods*; D001698:Biomedical Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008953:Models, Anatomic; D013704:Temporomandibular Joint / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D013997:Time Factors; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled