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 nearly anything else that can be described. The resources themselves (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--a unique identifier that serves as substitute reference for the resource itself. The CTS2 specification depends heavily on the existence of unique identifiers.
5.2.2.3.1 - CTS 2 Service Root
5.2.2.3.2 - CTS 2 Import ResourceÂ
5.2.2.3.3 - CTS2 IRI Resolution Service
5.2.2.3.4 - Authoring Core Service
5.2.2.3.5 - Exporter Core Service
5.2.2.3.6 - Loader Core Service
5.2.2.3.7 - Query Core Service
5.2.2.3.8 - Code System Services
5.2.2.3.9 - Concept Domain Services
5.2.2.3.10 - Entity Description Services
