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.
CTS 2 defines a service root component that allows for the query of information and access to all of the service capabilities. The service root component can feed external metadata discovery service.
CTS 2 provides support for importing complete contents of a versionable resource (code system version, value set definition version, systemization version, value set version, concept domain binding or value set resolution rule version) from an external resource, or alternatively applying an ordered list of changes to existing content
 (CTS2 RFP)
