ISO/FDIS 17117-1

This document defines universal and specialized characteristics of health terminological resources that make them fit for the purposes required of various applications. It covers only terminological resources that are primarily designed to be used for clinical concept representation or to those parts of other terminological resources designed to be used for clinical concept representation.

This document helps users to assess whether a terminology has the characteristics or provides the functions that will support their specified requirements. In order to do that, this document focuses on defining characteristics and functions of terminological resources in healthcare that can be used to identify different types of terminological resources for categorization purposes.

NOTE1 Categorization of healthcare terminological systems according to the name of the system might not be helpful and has caused confusion in the past.

The following aspects are not covered in this document:

characteristics for computational biology terminology.