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DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634088
The Semantics of Procedures and Diseases in SNOMED® CT
Publication History
Publication Date:
06 February 2018 (online)
![](https://www.thieme-connect.de/media/10.1055-s-00035037/200604/lookinside/thumbnails/10-1055-s-0038-1634088-1.jpg)
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.
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