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 IHTSDO) 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 utilize to support its work with SNOMED CT.
Figure 8 Tools useful for an NRC.

In the later sections of this document the typical practice and tools related to each of the above described work tasks will be presented.

IHTSDO 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, IHTSDO puts great effort into development of IHTSDO tooling services, which represent a range of services and tools that have been made available to support IHTSDO, Members, and the Community of Practice. Over time, IHTSDO 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 the IHTSDO's Open Tooling Framework (OTF). 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 IHTSDO and its Members.
IHTSDO tooling services are listed at http://www.ihtsdotools.org, and the service status page at http://status.ihtsdotools.org provides real time monitoring on the availability of IHTSDO tooling services .

IHTSDO Workbench

The IHTSDO Workbench is the predecessor of OTF and is currently used to support IHTSDO and Members in the management and maintenance of SNOMED CT. The source code for IHTSDO Workbench is open source under an Apache 2 license and contains the following functionality:

• Terminology lifecycle management
• Automated workflow
• Searching, browsing and editing
• Support for Reference sets
• Translation tool
• Support for cross mapping to other terminologies
• Build process automation

IHTSDO is exploring new authoring tools as part of its OTF strategy. As a consequence of this, investment in the Workbench will be reduced to that required to support the maintenance of the application for existing purposes. IHTSDO will review ongoing needs and may need to invest in new functionality in the Workbench if an appropriate case is put forward.
The IHTSDO Open Workbench can be accessed via this webpage: http://tiny.cc/78vgbx