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Terminology binding is a concept used widely in e-health. Notwithstanding its use as in the special concept of term binding below, terminology binding usually refers to the association between a data point (node) of an information or data model and the set of terms that can be used to populate that data point's value. Thus, terminology binding is a constraint imposed through a specification, reflecting some business rule. Such a business rule could be internationally agreed, or could be a much more localised constraint, imposed by a local institution or software vendor. In openEHR Archetypes, terminology binding can be specified using the constraint-binding section, particularly with placeholder constraints as described in section 5.3.9 (p62) of the ADL 1.4 specification.
On the terminology side of the binding, there are several approaches. The SNOMED community started with the idea of producing separately packaged subsets of SNOMED for particular usage contexts. More recent developments support the notion of 'Refsets'. This is based on a mechanism for tagging a set of terms within the SNOMED database as belonging to a predefined constrained use set. Any term can belong to one or more such Refsets. For instance, all drugs approved by the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration could have their descriptions tagged in SNOMED as belonging to the TGA-approved Refset. This mechanism has the attraction that the entire SNOMED distribution remains intact, unlike subsets which are released as separate entities. Both of the above two approaches, which support terminology binding by extension, could readily lead to an unmanageble unmanageable proliferation of subsets or Refsets.
A more flexible and manageble manageable arrangement is terminology binding by intension (sic). Here, the set of permissible values for a data point is expressed by a query or formula. Intensional data binding is the default for most datatypes. When one wishes to specify a date range, for instance, one does not normally enunciate all of the individual dates within the lower and upper bounds.
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