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Structured terminologies provide a foundation for information interoperability by improving the effectiveness of information exchange. They provide a means for organizing information and serve to define the semantics of information using consistent and computable mechanisms.

Terminologies are constructed to meet scope specific domain requirements. The domain-specific nature of structured vocabularies often leads to variation in design patterns across the available terminology space. The ability to provide consistent representation and access to a broad set of terminologies enables multiple disparate terminology sources to be available to a community, and helps to ensure consistency across the domain space of that community.

Service interfaces to structured terminologies should be flexible enough to accurately represent a wide variety of vocabularies and other lexically?-based resources.

At its most abstract level, the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) specification is about a collection of resources ? --specifically code systems, value set definitions, concept domains, concept domain bindings, and value sets.

A resource can be a thing, abstraction, idea, process or pretty much nearly anything else that can be described. The resources themselves (e.g. for example, the class called "tree", a process in medicine called "surgical incision", the philosopher from Buffalo named "Barry Smith") are outside of the scope of this specification.

A resource is designated by a proxy proxy--a unique identifier that serves as substitute reference for the resource itself. The CTS2 specification depends heavily on the existence of unique identifiers.

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5.2.2.3.12 - Value Set Definition Services