TSC Product List CTS
Contents
Product Brief - CTS - Common Terminology Services
title
Type
Normative, ANSI Standard
Releases
Summary
The HL7 Common Terminology Services (HL7 CTS) defines an Application Programming Interface (API) that can be used by HL7 Version 3 software when accessing terminological content.
Description
The Common Terminology Services (CTS) specification was developed as an alterna¬tive to a common data structure. Instead of specifying what an external terminology must look like, HL7 has chosen to identify the common functional charac¬teristics that an external termi¬nology must be able to provide. As an example, an HL7 compli¬ant terminology service will need to be able to deter¬mine whether a given concept code is valid within the particular resource. Instead of describing a table keyed by the resource identifier and concept code, the CTS specification describes an Application Programming Interface (API) call that takes a resource identifier and concept code as input and returns a true/false value. Each terminology developer is free to implement this API call in whatever way is most appropriate for them.
