There are numerous tools that NRCs may need, depending on the extent to which they customize or extend the SNOMED CT International Edition.

The tools necessary for an NRC depend on what services the NRC will deliver and what approach the NRC will take to deliver its services. However, at a minimum, an NRC needs a platform where SNOMED CT can be made available to users, i.e. a tool to support distribution to users of the International Edition (received from SNOMED International) and potential National Extensions. Moreover, if the NRC decides to develop National Extensions, including a national translation or national Reference sets, tools are also required to support these tasks. Figure 8 shows various types of tooling that an NRC can use to support its work with SNOMED CT.

Later sections of this document present the typical practice and tools related to each of the above work tasks .

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SNOMED International Tooling service

NRCs are free to choose or develop tools to enable distribution and management of SNOMED CT and national derivatives in their countries. However, SNOMED International puts great effort into development of SNOMED International tooling services, which represent a range of services and tools that have been made available to support SNOMED International, Members, and the Community of Practice. Over time, SNOMED International aims to include tools necessary to support the full range of essential NRC functions in its tooling services.

Tooling service developments are now based on SNOMED International's Open Tooling Framework (OTF) and the source code is made available under an Apache v2 open source licence (where feasible). This framework is a set of standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), bound by a set of principles that define fundamental software services. These services are consumed by business applications, which are being developed to satisfy the tooling requirements of SNOMED International and its Members.

SNOMED International tooling services are listed at http://snomed.org/tools. This page provides a list of the tools' status and pointers to useful documentation for both users and developers.