What is "foma"

Foma may refer to:

• FOMA (Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access), a Japanese mobile telecommunications service
• Sergei Fomenko, nicknamed "Foma", Ukrainian musician
• Foma, a term meaning "harmless untruths" from the fictional religion Bokononism in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle
• Foma, the narrator of Nikolai Gogol's short story " A Bewitched Place"
• Foma, an album by The Nixons
• Foma, a Brazilian design studio founded by Davison Carvalho
• Foma, a Czech photographic film company, formerly Fotochema
• foma (software), an open-source compiler, programming language, and C library for constructing finite-state automata and transducers compatible with Xerox lexc and twolc

Foma is the first full-length studio album by The Nixons. The name of the title track is from the 1963 novel Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Foma is defined in the album's liner notes as "harmless untruths intended to comfort simple souls; lies."

Foma is a free and open source finite-state toolkit created and maintained by Mans Hulden. It includes a compiler, programming language, and C library for constructing finite-state automata and transducers (FST's) for various uses, most typically Natural Language Processing uses such as morphological analysis.

Foma can replace the proprietary Xerox Finite State Toolkit for compiling and running FST's written in the lexc and xfst formalisms. The speed is comparable with the Xerox tools for most lexicons, although foma can be 3 or 4 times slower for very large lexicons (e.g. >100,000 words). Foma is also one of the possible backends of the free and open source Helsinki Finite State Toolkit (where other backends provide support for further formalisms).

There are several FOSS morphologies written in lexc/xfst compatible with foma, e.g. for the Sámi, Cornish, Faroese, Finnish, Komi, Mari, Udmurt, Buriat, Greenlandic language and Iñupiaq languages.