This page is the top level page for the LexEVS CTS2 Guide documentation. This page and any child pages will moved to the LexEVS space once that is created during the VKC migration from Media Wiki to Confluence.
The guide includes the following sections:
What is CTS2?
CTS2 stands for “Common Terminology Services Release 2”. It provides a standardized interface for the usage and management of terminologies. CTS2 specifications are based (and expand) on ‘Common Terminology Service’ specifications as outlined in HL7 Service Function Model – Draft Standard for Trial Use (DSTU Release 2).
How is CTS2 important in vocabulary management?
Structured terminologies have some common ‘resources’ such as Code Systems, Domains, Value Sets and access to these resources is enabled usually through a service interface. CTS2 strives to provide a consistent representation and flexible service interfaces to structured terminologies. This enables us to accurately represent and manage wide variant of vocabularies and other lexically-based resources.
CTS2 Platform Independent Model (PIM) provides a standard service information and computational model. The information model specifies the structural definition, attributes and associations of these common terminology ‘resources’ and computations model specifies the service descriptions and interfaces needed to access and maintain structured terminologies.
Even though the detailed description of CTS2 PIM specifications can be found on the OMG site http://www.omg.org/spec/CTS2/1.0/Beta1/, the following tables provide a concise look at its structure. CTS2 organizes resources in terms of coding schemes, entities and value sets and provides various function areas to access these resources using CTS2 module and services.
Where can I learn more about CTS2? Are there some existing implementations or examples available?
http://informatics.mayo.edu/cts2/index.php/Main_Page
CTS2 specification allows (and encourages) modular implementation of its model components and service interfaces. A CTS2 service instance (a particular implementation of CTS2 specifications) may choose to implement only a subset of model and services that it needs. [Should we give a quick list of CTS2 implementations available here. This may directly link to section ‘CTS2 in action’]
I was planning to use LexEVS to manage my ontologies and terms? Should I switch to CTS2 based implementation? What is the difference?
Actually LexEVS 6.0 (released on [put the date or link to it here]) has been very close to functionally equivalent to CTS2 specifications. Please note that LexEVS 6.0 APIs are not fully CTS2 compliant but offer identical functionality as compared to most CTS2 services. Following table compares what function CTS2 specifies and whether it is available in LexEVS 6.0 release. Please note that there are additional functions LexEVS 6.0 makes available in addition to what are listed here. To find more about it please click here [put the LexEVS 6.0 documentation link here].
