Abstract
Cataloging physiological and anatomical terminologies may provide a fundamental basis for bridging the involvement of muscles, skeletal, and other essential parts in human movement, in addition to understanding their role on human morbidity. We present a general formalized ontology model that focuses on anatomical and physiological entities that are active during human movement, called the Kinetic Human Movement Ontology (KHMO). We developed a model to represent human movement that links human postures using OWL2. We used the model to assemble various open-sourced controlled terminologies involved in human movement - anatomical entities, physiological terms, etc. KHMO presents 1954 classes, 42 properties, and 1921 logical axioms, and passed logical satisfiability and consistency tests. Compared to physical activity-related ontologies, KHMO exhibited high semiotic quality, including high domain coverage. KHMO is publicly available as an open-source resource on our GitHub repository, and we provide software for data management of our ontology model. We envision furthering the research of our work to interoperate with human data movement and for data curation and harmonization endeavors.
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Data availability
The ontology model for KHMO is available under our Zenodo40 and GitHub repositories41. KHMO is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC BY 4.0). The permanent URL to access KHMO is http://w3id.org/khmo. The permanent URL can be used to open the file with Protégé. For example, from the menu: File > Open From URL. The GitHub repository provides a README with details to navigate the resource files. The parent directory of the repository contains the ontology (khmo.owl) and the working file (khmo-base.owl). The subdirectories contain extracted ontologies for Foundation Model of Anatomy Ontology (fma workspace), Neuro Behavior Ontology (nbo workspace), and Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (obi workspace). These workspaces contain information on how to replicate the extraction and merging (merge-workspace).
Code availability
Management software.
The data and information management software to generate knowledge graph is available on GitHub53.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) under award #RP220244, UTHealth-Houston-CPRIT Innovation for Cancer Prevention and Research Training Program Summer Undergraduate Fellowship (Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas Grant #RP210042), and by the National Institutes of Health under award #R21DK134815, # U01AG088076, and #R01HS027846.
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M.A., E.N., L.C. conceptualized the project. E.N., M.A., V.H. developed the model and curated data to develop the finalized public version. M.A. and A.L. conducted the evaluation. M.A., E.N., V.H., Y.G. developed the first version of the manuscript. M.A., V.H., E.N., Y.G., A.L., L.C. reviewed and revised the final manuscript.
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Amith, M., Ha, V., Nguyen, E. et al. Kinetic Human Movement Ontology: a semantic terminology model to symbolically represent physiological movement. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06984-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06984-z
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