The NCTS provides a syndication service used to provide a machinable interface to check for and get content distributions. This is used to distribute SNOMED CT-AU RF2 release and Ontoserver prebuilt binary indexes for those running their own Ontoserver instance. This service will also be used for all native formats of code systems being syndicated.
This service is basically a W3C Atom feed with some extensions. There was a poster on this topic at the Bratislava SNOMED CT Expo which provides some more details, motivations and benefits.
However for FHIR resources there are choices. It is possible to simply use the FHIR API and not provide FHIR resources in this kind of syndication service at all. It is also possible to put each version of each resource (CodeSystem, ValueSet, ConceptMap) in the feed, and/or Bundle resources that group a set of these resources together.
Currently the Australian NRC is progressing to providing syndication of these resources by exposing each individual version of each resource in the syndication feed, with the possibility of also providing these resources in Bundles in addition to give consumers of the feed the option of subscribing to coarser grained groupings of resources.
This discussion page has been created to share thoughts, opinions and comments on this approach and as a collaboration point should others wish to use a similar approach or even a different approach and share ideas.
2 Comments
Dion McMurtrie
Now there's a Java based client for the syndication service with a command line interface, Maven plugin and Java library. You can find that at https://github.com/dionmcm/ncts-syndication-client
It will cache downloaded files locally and when asked for downloads will check the cached files (if present) against the SHA256 in the syndication feed, if not matching it will be redownloaded. The SHA256 is also checked post download and errors thrown if it fails. The client can also be used to download single/multiple categories of artefact and latest or all versions available.
Comments and pull requests welcome.
Dion McMurtrie
This has now moved to https://github.com/AuDigitalHealth/ncts-syndication-client and there's now a .NET version at https://github.com/AuDigitalHealth/ncts-syndication-client-dotnet
Again, comments, issues and pull requests welcome!