Terminology Service

Basic Functional Requirements:

High level functional requirements for a terminology service include:

• Resolving codes into concept (descriptions)
• Resolving subsumption and other "semantic" queries between concepts
• Resolving and expanding valuesets, supporting operations between them
• Maintaining terminology systems, with provenance and versioning
• Supporting mappings between terminology systems

Integration Patterns:

• Terminology resolution as a centralized (web) service in a SOA
• Terminology as a component in a tightly coupled architecture
• Terminology as an in-memory application feature
• Hybrid combinations of the above
  
  
• High-throughput online systems, mostly focused on resolving relationships
  between coded concepts and valuesets (e.g. to support semantic queries or CDS)
• Low-throughput online systems, mostly focused on lookups (e.g. to support CDS authoring tools)
• Low-throughput offline systems, mostly focused on maintenance (e.g. to support maintenance tools)

Candidate Standards & Specifications:

• FHIR terminology service - HL7 FHIR TS 
• CTS-2 v1.1 specification - OMG CTS-2
• Recommended TS interaction scenarios and protocols
  
  
• SNOMED-CT APIs - SnAPI [ReST]
• RxNORM APIs - RxNav [ReST]
• LOINC APIs - LOINC [ReST] [FHIR]
• UMLS APIs - UMLS [ReST]

Known Service Implementations :

• Apelon : TBD - wiki http://apelon-dts.sourceforge.net/ 
• 3M : both proprietary (on CTS-2 and 3M APIs) and open source (on CTS 1.2 and 3M) versions of the HDD service exist.
                  HDD Access website:      https://www.hddaccess.com/
                  Software (binary and source) downloads:            https://www.hddaccess.com/hdd-access-products/download-hdd-access
                  Content and documentation downloads:              https://www.hddaccess.com/current-content-documentation/
                  Online search and browser:        https://www.hddaccess.com/hddbrowser/search
                  Online API WADL endpoint:        https://www.hddaccess.com/hddbrowser/api/application.wadl
                  Online API documentation:         http://apps.3mhis.com/docs/Care_Innovation/HDD/HDD_Access/HDD_Access_Library/index.htm#144905.htm
                  Uploading contributions:             https://www.hddaccess.com/hdd-access-community/open-exchange 
• HLI : TBD
• LexVS : TBD - wiki https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/display/LexEVS/LexEVS
• OntoServer - http://ontoserver.csiro.au:8080/
  • Provides support for FHIR TS API  – http://ontoserver.csiro.au/fhir