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 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 anything else that can be described. The resources themselves (e.g. 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 Resource
