Introduction
The openEHR Terminology is a simple terminology that includes all the terms found in the terminology specification. The openEHR terminology is being used by the Java project, by the Archetype Editor, and by various other tools.
See here for the current computable version of this. The associated schema is here. The schema is an XML schema - documentation of this file is provided.
The terminology file now in widest use is probably the Java project one, which can be found here.
Note that in the openEHR terminology specification, there are two kinds of vocabularies - code-sets, where the codes stand for themselves (includes ISO 3166 & ISO 639 codes, IANA MME types etc), and term sets, where each term has a numeric code, and has a description that can be translated into multiple languages.
Current Status
There are various problems that have been observed with the terminologym including:
- the current 'official' terminology XML file is not conveniently structured
- some codes are missing, e.g. the IANA MIME types
Future
The Java project currently has a better version of the terminology, both structurally and content-wise, which can be found here. The only drawback of this file is that it is only in English so far. This file, if translated would probably be a better candidate for the openEHR Terminology than the current one. Questions to consider:
- would each translation belong in a separate file?
- what is the XSD of the file?
- what tools would be needed to maintain this terminology (at a minumum, they need to know how to work with the translations)
Another possible solution might be to define the terminology in the same format as SNOMED, which would make it palatable to SNOMED tools. This may provide useful answers for translation representation.