Dear all,
Following on from previous announcements providing early visibility of the Concrete Domains proposal, SNOMED International would now like to provide more technical details of the planned transition. Please see here (and the various sub-pages) for details of the current proposed technical changes: https://confluence.ihtsdotools.org/mag/concrete-domains-community-of-practice-consultation.
In this child page in particular there is guidance on the impact for both maintainers of SNOMED CT plus for implementers and vendors of software that utilises the terminology: https://confluence.ihtsdotools.org/mag/concrete-domains-community-of-practice-consultation/snomed-international-proposal-for-representing-concrete-domains-in-rf2
Please, however, be aware that the technical proposal is still in the consultation stage, and therefore changes to the proposal may still be made before the final solution is implemented.
The transition has been discussed and agreed with numerous stakeholders from the community, and as such is targeted to be implemented over the course of the next two International Release cycles, as follows:
Q1 2021:
- A technical preview will be published in line with the January 2021 International Edition, with drug concept strengths and counts expressed as concrete values in the new Relationships file.
- This is currently planned to be a full RF2 International Edition package (as opposed to a standalone Delta file containing Concrete Domains), containing all International content in addition to the new Concrete Domains Relationship file
- (ie) it will comprise the January 2021 International Edition release as if we had already transitioned to Concrete Domains, as a preview of what the final Release package will look like when the transition is complete.
Q3 2021:
- The current target is for the July 2021 International Edition to be the first release after the transition to Concrete Domains. This means that the RF2 package would be impacted as follows:
- existing drug concept strength and count relationships inactivated +
- existing strength and count attribute types will be inactivated, replaced with new ones using the same FSNs.
- Inferred Relationship file changes:
- Stated OWL Axiom file changes:
- existing drug concept axioms will be updated to use concrete values +
- existing strength and count attribute types will be inactivated, replaced with new ones using the same FSNs.
- Additional Features in International Release
- new separate concrete value relationship file will express these same attributes using numeric values
- new attributes will be used, although they will have the same FSNs as the current attributes
- MRCM will include new rows to indicate that the new attribute types are expected to take a concrete domain - specifically numbers - as target values.
If you can foresee any critical issues with the transition plans, or have any questions regarding any of these upcoming changes, please contact SNOMED International immediately at support@snomed.org with “Concrete Domains transition question” in the subject line.
Kind regards,
Andrew Atkinson | Release Manager