Abstract
The Technical Committee on “Medical Informatics” of the European Committee for Standardization
(CEN{TC251) is supporting developers ofterminological systems in healthcare by a series
of standards. The dream of “universal” coding system was abandoned in favor of a coherent
family of terminologies, diversified according to tasks; two ideas were introduced:
(1) the “categorical structure”, i.e. a model of semantic categories and their relations
within a subject field and (2) the “cross-thesaurus”, i.e. a system of descriptors
to build a systematic representation (called here “dissection") for each terminological
phrase, coherent across diverse terminologies on a given subject field.
The goal is to assure coexistence and interoperability (and reciprocal support for
development and maintenance) to three generations of systems: (1) traditional paper-based
systems (first generation); (2) compositional systems built according to a categorical
structure and a cross-thesaurus (second generation) and (3) formal models (third generation).
Various scenarios are presented, on the exploitation of computer-based terminological
systems. The idea of “operational meaning” of terminological phrases within administrative
and organizational contexts and the idea of “task-oriented details” are also introduced,
to justify and exploit design constraints on terminological systems.
Keywords
Healthcare Standards - Terminology Systems
