The SNOMED CT terminology provides a common language that enables a consistent way of indexing, storing, retrieving, and aggregating clinical data across specialties and sites of care. The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO®) maintains the SNOMED CT technical design, the content architecture, the SNOMED CT content (including the concepts table, the descriptions table, the relationships table, a history table and ICD mappings), and related technical documentation.
This document is intended to give a brief description, background context, explanatory notes on the SNOMED CT International Drugs and Substances project and the resulting Alpha release package, which will be published on 28-Feb, 2018 and as needed throughout the current release cycle.
The ALPHA release package is distributed for evaluation purposes only. It must not be used in production clinical systems or in clinical settings.
This document should be read by all those who will be reviewing or submitting questions or comments related to the Alpha Release, including participation in any follow up meetings.
The scope of the SNOMED CT International Drugs
Role chain and DL features to support classification of the product hierarchy and modeling of product roles have been deployed into production.
The release includes a significant number of examples of the following types of content updates:
Agreement on following have been reached and the features are in the process of implementation, which will be made available for preview before the release in July 2018
Outstanding modeling issue:
The scope of the SNOMED CT International Substances project
Role chain and DL features to support Modification groupers have been deployed and the first flattening has been successfully carried out.
Content on this Alpha release on 28-February 2018.
Combined Groupers ( Structure + Disposition) will be re-modeled as we progress, the volume for this category is small.
The Editorial Guidelines are being updated with current status and will be made available for review on 20180228
Detailed documentation regarding changes to the Substance and Drug hierarchies that are in scope to be reviewed for this Alpha release are located on the project Confluence sites:
Please note that comments and questions submitted related to content not specifically identified as in scope for this Alpha release will be rejected.
The Alpha release will be made available for your review with an effectiveTime of 20180228.
The RF2 package convention dictates that it contains all relevant files, regardless of whether or not there is content to be included in each particular release. Therefore, the package contains a mixture of files which contain both header rows and content data, and also files that are intentionally left blank (including only a header record). The reason that these files are not removed from the package is to draw a clear distinction between:
This allows users to easily distinguish between files that have purposefully been removed or not, as otherwise if files in option 2 above were left out of the package it could be interpreted as an error, rather than an intentional lack of content in that release.
As an essential part of SNOMED CT Logic Profile Enhancements, the OWL refsets have been developed to represent logic definitions following the international standard of OWL 2 Web Ontology Language. In this Alpha release and the 2018 July release, the scope for the content in the OWL axiom refset is limited to property chains, transitive properties, and reflexive properties. These are required semantics for classification by Description Logic reasoning services to support the Drug, Substance and Anatomy content projects. They cannot be fully represented by the RF2 stated and inferred relationship files.
The OWL Reference sets are placed under the Terminology folder in the release file package.
The limited scope of OWL refsets will allow sufficient time for users to develop and update their tooling and systems. The plan is to have full representation of all definitions in the OWL axiom refset in January 2019 release. The stated relationship file will be deprecated after the January 2019 release.
The inferred relationship file will maintain the same format and structure, and it is no longer an equivalent to the stated form (containing all necessary and sufficient conditions). It is a collection of all the necessary conditions and represents a subset of the full semantics.
Please provide your feedback on the Confluence page at OWL refsets preview.
A set of documentations have been developed to support the Logic Profile Enhancements. Please see the detail in the following links.
OWL Reference Sets Specification (draft)
Necessary Normal Form for Inferred relationships (draft)
Approvals
Download .pdf here:
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Draft Amendment History
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