This document defines universal and specialized characteristics of health terminological resources that make them fit for the purposes required of various applications. It covers only terminological resources that are primarily designed to be used for clinical concept representation or to those parts of other terminological resources designed to be used for clinical concept representation.

This document helps users to assess whether a terminology has the characteristics or provides the functions that will support their specified requirements. In order to do that, this document focuses on defining characteristics and functions of terminological resources in healthcare that can be used to identify different types of terminological resources for categorization purposes.

NOTE 1        Categorization of healthcare terminological systems according to the name of the system might not be helpful and has caused confusion in the past.

The following aspects are not covered in this document:

—     evaluations of terminological resources;

—     health service requirements for terminological resources and evaluation criteria based on the characteristics and functions;

—     the nature and quality of mappings between different terminologies;

NOTE 2        It is unlikely that a single terminology will meet all the terminology requirements of a healthcare organization: some terminology providers produce mappings to administrative or classification systems such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The presence of such maps would be a consideration in the evaluation of the terminology.

—     the nature and quality of mappings between different versions of the same terminology;

NOTE 3        To support data migration and historical retrieval, terminology providers can provide maps between versions of their terminology. The presence of such maps would be a consideration in the evaluation of the terminology.

—     terminology server requirements and techniques and tools for terminology developers;

—     characteristics for computational biology terminology.