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 alternative to a common data structure. Instead of specifying what an external terminology must look like, HL7 has chosen to identify the common functional characteristics that an external terminology must be able to provide. As an example, an HL7 compliant terminology service will need to be able to determine 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.
