Figure 2

Extending the scope of an ontology. (a) Current anatomical ontologies are purely symbolic, providing a structured collection of terms each corresponding to a particular anatomical concept. An example is the EMAP Anatomy Ontology E-AO [8]. Symbolic ontologies define relationships such as 'part-of', 'is-a' or 'derives-from' (denoting a lineage). Ontologies with extended scope include graphical mapping (b) and iconic (c) representations; examples are the EMAP Painted domains (E-PD) and EMAP 3D Reconstructions (E-3DR) ontologies, respectively, from which the illustrations in (b,c) are taken. The lines between columns represent links, or mappings, between the concept symbols and other representations. A completely iconic representation of the embryo and, implicitly, of the corresponding anatomy is the reconstruction of the embryo as a three-dimensional grey-level voxel model (c) with a fully defined geometric space. This includes additional geometric and topological relationships such as 'volume', 'connected to', 'next-to', 'distance-from', and so on. The middle column (b) represents the step between concept and geometric space reconstruction and is an image representation we define in the same coordinate frame as the embryo reconstructions.