Page History

...

RxNorm now includes the National Drug File - Reference Terminology (NDF-RT) from the Veterans Health Administration, which allows for
classification of the RxNorm terms into their chemical and physiological effect categories. NDF-RT is a terminology used to code clinical drug properties, including mechanism of action, physiologic effect, and therapeutic category.

...

NCI chose to use MDA because it is a set of standards that have worked well in other areas, and they
didn’t want to have to “reinvent the wheel.” The advantage to this approach is that MDA allowed NCI to use available tools to automatically
generate some of the code, while giving them the flexibility to tailor it to their specific needs. In the
future, when the system’s requirements change, they can update their models and quickly regenerate
the appropriate code.

The MDA model is related to multiple standards, including the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the Meta-Object Facility (MOF), XML Metadata Interchange (XMI).
Of particular importance to model-driven architecture is the notion of model transformation. A specific standard language for model transformation has been defined by OMG called QVT.

...