It is acknowledged that members and affiliates developing reference sets have the need to create human-readable versions of the reference sets. Human readable reference sets are used to allow reference sets to be inspected without requiring a software - service to resolve the id's referenced in the reference set.

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• Review
  • I.e. Subject matter experts who are involved with reviewing the content of reference sets
• Educational and dissemination
  • I.e. when explaining the structure and content of reference sets

Purpose of Human Readable Reference Sets

SNOMED International specify specifies a recommended format for human-readable reference sets to

• Avoid people reinventing and coming out with different solutions

• Allow a standard representation of reference sets shared as part of agreements with other standards bodies

• Allow tooling support (whether internally or externally developed)

Format 

A column is added for the human-readable version of an attribute, with the addition of '_term' to the attribute name.

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• The corresponding human-readable column for the attribute refsetId is refsetId_term
• The corresponding human-readable column for the attribute referencedComponentId id referencedComponentId_term.
• The corresponding human-readable column for the attribute acceptabilityId is acceptabilityId_term

An example of a standard format Language reference set

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An example of a human-readable version of a Language reference set

Characteristics of the Term

When creating a human-readable refset it should be considered which term to include for each of the human-readable attributes. It is often preferable to include the  Simple reference sets  from an appropriate dialect within the expressions to improve the human-readability of the attribute value. However, if it is required to disambiguate which hierarchy the concepts come from then the FSN can be used. 

Human-readable Annotations to Reference Set Attributes and/or Members

Sometimes it may be relevant to add one or more columns to function as a placeholder for comments related to either specific attributes, or for the reference set member (row) as a whole. To enable that these columns can be automatically identified as non-standard specific, we recommend to use following naming convention for these columns.

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• <attributename>_<string> is used to refer to a specific attribute value
• _<string> is used to refer to a whole reference set row, i.e a specific version of a reference set member.

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Example of comments related to specific attribute values

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Example of comments related to a whole reference set member (a version of a refset member)

Considerations for Use of the Human-Readable Reference Set

For all uses of human-readable reference sets and use of additional annotations it is very important that users do not include information which affects the use of the reference set within the human-readable columns (columns with the '_' prefix). All information relevant for implementation, processing and processing of the reference set should be represented according to the standard, machine-processable format. Consequently, all columns with the '_'-prefix should be able to be ignored when the reference set is implemented. 

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