NucLexNuclear Medicine Lexicon and Theranostics Ontology
Stage W0: private living prototype12 of 30 manuscripts drafted, 0 reviewed; 50 lexicon entries in draftWhat each later stage would need to show

Lexicon · Mathematical and computational foundations

Lexicon entryDraftNX-C016

Terminology server

Fully specified name: Terminology server (concept)

A service exposing operations over terminology content.

Scope note
State supported operations, editions, versions, and permissions.
Synonyms
None recorded as true synonyms in this context.
Monograph
No monograph is assigned to this entry.
External mappings
None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
Formal status
Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.

Notes

A terminology server is software that holds one or more code systems and answers questions about them over a network interface: look up a code and return its display and properties, validate that a code belongs to a value set, expand a value set into its members, translate a code from one system to another, and test whether one concept subsumes another. HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) defines a standard terminology service in terms of operations on the Code system, Value set, and Concept map resources, and most current servers implement that interface.

The scope note lists what a user must know before trusting an answer. Which operations does the server support? Which editions of SNOMED CT, LOINC, or other systems does it hold, and at which versions? Who may query it, and under which license? A lookup against last year's edition can return a code that has since been inactivated; a value-set expansion depends on the versions of every code system it draws from.

NucLex has no terminology server. The project roadmap describes a public API as a later stage, and the publication will describe such a service only after it exists and its operations have been tested. The FHIR R5 terminology service page describes the standard interface.

Sources consulted (1)
  • https://www.hl7.org/fhir/R5/terminology-service.html