The ontology services can be categorised into two main forms
- An Application that enables people to view and maintain ontologies, value sets, information models and query definitions
- A set of (REST) APIs so that the resources can be extracted and used by other systems i.e. integrated into other systems.
All are built using open source code available in a set of repositories at https://github.com/endeavourhealth-discovery
Ontology and information model model application
The live manager is accessible at https://im.endeavourhealth.net/#/
The development version is accessible at https://dev.endhealth.co.uk/#/ which is generally a month or two further forward
Default contents include
- The major health ontologies such as Snomed-CT (UK version and London extensions), considered as "core ontology"
- The standard code based taxonomies such as OPCS-4 and ICD10 and the maps between them and the core ontology
- The local code schemes such as EMIS, TPP and some Hospital trusts, and legacy code taxonomies such as Read 2 and CTV3 and the maps between them and the core ontology
- A proven real world common data model based on FHIR like types (extended to real data) , modelled as an RDF graph, with maps to the model from source data formats used in primary, community, acute and urgent care providers that used the London One London Level 2 Discovery data service.
- Libraries of live in use value sets bound to the fields within the model
- Library of value sets used in queries including the core Snomed-CT UK reference sets and sets used in queries including QOF concept sets.
- Example Libraries of feature and query definitions used as actual operational queries for data on health records.
Application functionality to enable creation and maintenance of Libraries for organisational specific ontologies, value sets, data models and queries
Information service APIs
As well as the information model manager and various modules, the service provides a suite of APIs to support the use of data held within the information model libraries.
Web APIs
The ability to obtain resources such as Value sets using FHIR APIs
Distribution services
As well as accessible by APIs and applications, the information model services provide distribution facilities for content of the IM for use in subscriber data bases or subscriber applications. All content of the information model can be distributed both in bulk and delta form
Set distributor
The concept and value set distributor maintains tables of value sets for databases that use local instances of the Discovery information model.
This is part of the information model distribution service that runs on an application server, and is designed to detect changes to the content of the information model and regenerate the value sets from the value set definitions. The value sets are regenerated whenever a value set definition changes or whenever there is an update to the concepts within the information model.
Underpinning modelling architectures
All of the services are based on RDF graphs with classes defined in SHACL shapes from which code classes are generated and made available as Java or Typescript.
Details of the underlying models can be viewed on the extensive det of Information model pages