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Methods Inf Med 2006; 45(04): 354-358
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634088
Original Article
Schattauer GmbH

The Semantics of Procedures and Diseases in SNOMED® CT

S. Schulz
1   Department of Medical Informatics, Freiburg University, Freiburg, Germany
,
S. Hanser
1   Department of Medical Informatics, Freiburg University, Freiburg, Germany
,
U. Hahn
2   Jena University Language & Information Engineering (JULIE) Lab, Jena, Germany
,
J. Rogers
3   School of Computer Science, Manchester University, Manchester, United Kingdom
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

Publication Date:
06 February 2018 (online)

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Summary

Objectives: SNOMED® CT is emerging as a reference terminology for the entire health care process. It claims to be founded on logic-based modelling principles. In this article, we analyze a special encoding scheme for diseases and procedures in SNOMED® CT, the so-called relationship groups (RGs), which had been devised to avoid ambiguities in definitions.

Methods: We reformulate SNOMED® CT’s relationship groups in the format of description logics in order to check whether RGs serve the needs they were designed for.

Results: We show that a considerable proportion of relationship groups represent hidden mereological relations. We also report discrepancies encountered between the defined semantics of many SNOMED® CT terms and their intuitive meaning, as well as inconsistencies detected between the definition of various complex composed terms and the definition of their top-level parents.

Conclusions: We formulate recommendations for improving SNOMED® CT by replacing most occurrences of relation groups by formally more adequate “part-of” relations.

Keywords

SNOMED CT - knowledge representation - logic
 

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