=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1327/2
|storemode=property
|title=Profiling ICD-11 Terminological Content Using the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Standard
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1327/icbo2014_paper_18.pdf
|volume=Vol-1327
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icbo/JiangSCUC14
}}
==Profiling ICD-11 Terminological Content Using the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Standard==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1327/icbo2014_paper_18.pdf
ICBO 2014 Proceedings
Profiling ICD-11 Terminological Content Using the
Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Standard
Guoqian Jiang, Harold R. Solbrig, Can Celik, Bedirhan T. Ustun
Christopher G. Chute World Health Organization
Mayo Clinic College of Medicine Geneva, Switzerland
Rochester, MN, USA
Abstract—In the beta phase of the 11th revision of of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT). SNOMED CT
International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the World is owned and maintained by the International Health
Health Organization (WHO) exposes ICD-11 content through a Terminology Standard Development Organization (IHTSDO).
collection of web services. The emerging Common Terminology The IHTSDO and the WHO signed a collaborative agreement
Services 2 (CTS2) standard provides a common model and in July 2010, aiming at enabling harmonization—as
semantics for representation, interchange, and federation of complementary tools—of WHO Classifications and SNOMED
terminological resources. We hypothesize that the CTS2 CT, which essentially establishes SNOMED CT as the core of
standard can provide service layer of standardization that could
potentially aid in the interoperability among authoring the ontological component of ICD [3].
applications for the ICD-11 revision. This paper examines the The beta phase of the ICD-11 revision started in May 2012,
existing WHO ICD-11 content services from the perspective of and WHO intends to accept public input through a distributed
the CTS2 standard. The content in the WHO ICD-11 content model of authoring. It is anticipated that the public reviewer
services was mapped to the Code System Catalog, Code System
community will potentially be large, as reviewers will want to
Version Catalog, Entity Description and Association models in
be able to access and download target ICD-11 contents into
the CTS2 specification. It proposes mappings for existing ICD-11
properties and suggests additional CTS2 properties may be
their own evaluation tools and/or try alternatives in their own
important for ICD-11. The mapping effort was used to develop a environment. To enable social computation and collaboration
prototype of the CTS2 Services Wrapper for the ICD-11. In among broader communities, it is imperative to have an open-
conclusion, the CTS2 standard is useful in exposing ICD-11 data access solution for ICD-11 contents. In a previous study,
content representation through predictable and familiar services. we proposed to build Simple Knowledge Organization System
(SKOS)-compliant Semantic Web RESTful services that aim
Keywords—ICD-11; CTS2; Medical Classification; Data to support the authoring application development of ICD-11
Standards; Biomedical Ontologies [4]. In a recent development, WHO has exposed the ICD-11
content through a collection of web services, which include the
I. INTRODUCTION SKOS-based Semantic Web Resource Description Framework
The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is an (RDF) services (below).
international data standard presently maintained and curated by The Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) [5] is an
the World Health Organization (WHO) [1], and is widely used emerging Object Management Group (OMG) standard [6] that
to support international comparison of mortality statistics. In defines the functional requirements of a set of service
March 2007, WHO officially launched the 11th revision of interfaces to allow the representation, access, and maintenance
ICD (ICD-11) that aims to digitize the content of ICD using of taxonomy content either locally, or across a federation of
modern knowledge representation methods and standards terminology service nodes. We consider that building CTS2
instead of a traditional manual revision process. services on the top of the WHO ICD-11 content services will
To facilitate the ICD-11 revision, WHO developed a potentially 1) provide standards-based representation of ICD-
content model to present the knowledge that underlies the 11 content; 2) provide sophisticated terminology services (e.g.,
definitions of an ICD entity. The content model is composed of lexical/semantic query services; value set definition and
three layers: a foundation layer, a linearization layer, and an management services); 3) facilitate the interactions with other
ontological layer [2]. The foundation layer is the core product terminologies such as SNOMED CT; and 4) optimize the
of the ICD-11 revision that stores the full range of knowledge interoperability among downstream authoring applications for
of all classification units in ICD. Each linearization, of which ICD-11 revision.
there may be many such as Mortality, Morbidity and Primary The objective of this paper is to describe the existing WHO
Care, corresponds to the classical print versions of ICD. The ICD-11 content services using the CTS2 standard
ontological layer provides references to formal definition of specifications. We profiled the WHO ICD-11 content services
terms and relationships through two components: 1) Reference using the information models of Code System Catalog, Code
Ontologies and 2) The Common Ontology. The Common System Version Catalog, Entity Description and Association
Ontology forms the semantic backbone of the ICD Foundation from the CTS2 specification. We developed the mappings for
Layer and is a shared subset of the Systematized Nomenclature the elements between the two service models and identified the
33
ICBO 2014 Proceedings
CTS2 elements that are missing from the WHO services but The base URI of http://id.who.int has been adopted, with
important for the ICD-11 content representation and services. http://id.who.int/icd/schema as the prefix for the vocabulary
We also developed a prototype of the CTS2 Wrapper Services terms that are related to ICD classification efforts maintained
for ICD-11. by WHO and http://id.who.int/icd/entity for the foundation
entities related to ICD concepts.
II. BACKGROUND
Table 1 shows the service categories, URI scheme and
A. WHO ICD content services returned properties modeled and implemented in the existing
A Unified Resource Identifier (URI) is commonly used to WHO ICD content services. There are two content service
name and identify a resource, and is treated as a core principle categories: Foundation and Release. Under the release
of Semantic Web Linked Open Data by Tim Berners-Lee [7]. category, the URI Schemes are defined for the subcategories of
A RESTful, resource-oriented service exposes a URI for every the ICD-11 Linearizations and ICD-10 with/without minor
piece of data the client might need to interact with. A well- version. For each category, the URI Schemes for the Top Level
designed URI structure/scheme would allow users to easily and Individual Entities are defined separately. Fig. 1 shows a
explore and invoke ICD content through an implementation of HTML view of the RDF rendering for an individual entity in
the RESTful services. Recently, an ICD URI scheme was the Foundation category – “Acute myocardial infarction”.
proposed for naming and supporting web services by WHO.
Table 1.The service categories, URI scheme and returned properties modeled in the WHO ICD content services.
Service Categories URI Scheme Returned Properties
Foundation
Top Level
http://id.who.int/icd/entity Title, Definition, Child
Individual Entity Parent, Child, Title, Definition, Long Definition, Synonym,
Narrower Term, Inclusion, Exclusion, Body Site, Body
System, Causal Agents, Causal Mechanisms, Signs And
Symptoms, Genomic Characteristics, Investigation Findings,
Type, Intent, Activity when Injured, Object or Substance
Producing Injury, Mechanism of Injury, Place of Occurrence,
Substance Use, Children and Youth Impact, Communication
Impact, Interpersonal Relations Impact, Household Activities
Impact, Life Management Activities Impact, School Activities
Impact, Work Activities Impact, Mobility Impact, Self Care
http://id.who.int/icd/entity/{id} Impact, Social Participation Impact, Understanding Impact
Release
ICD-11 Linearizations
WITHOUT minor version
Top Level http://id.who.int/release/11/{Linearization
Name} Title, Latest Version, Version
Individual Entity http://id.who.int/release/11/{Linearization
Name}/{id} Title, Latest Version, Version
ICD-11 Linearizations
WITH minor version
Top Level http://id.who.int/release/11/{Minor
Version}/{Linearization Name} Title, Definition, Child
Individual Entity http://id.who.int/release/11/{Minor Code, Parent, Child, Title, Definition, Long Definition,
Version}/{Linearization Name}/{id} Inclusion, Exclusion, Index Terms, Class Kind, Source
ICD-10 WITHOUT minor
version
Top Level http://id.who.int/release/10 Title, Latest Version, Version
Individual Entity http://id.who.int/release/10/{CODE} Title, Latest Version, Version
ICD-10 WITH minor
version
http://id.who.int/release/10/{Minor
Top Level Version} Title, Definition, Child
http://id.who.int/release/10/{Minor Code, Parent, Child, Title, Definition, Inclusion, Exclusion,
Individual Entity Version}/{CODE} Class Kind, Coding Hint, Note
34
ICBO 2014 Proceedings
Fig. 1. A HTML view of the RDF rendering of the individual foundation entity “Acute myocardial infarction
(http://id.who.int/icd/entity/1334938734)”. (icd prefix: http://id.who.int/icd/schema/; skos: http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#.)
• Concept Domain Catalog - a catalog of abstract “concept
domains” that represent a collection of possible meanings.
B. CTS2 Standard Specification
CTS2 is an OMG specification [6] for representing, • Map Catalog - a catalog of “maps” - collection of rules that
accessing, and disseminating terminological content. The allow human or machine assisted transformation between
CTS2 platform independent model (PIM) describes the formal the codes in one value set or code system and those in a
model and semantics of the various components. The PIM second.
model is rendered in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) The CTS2 specification also supports a number of
and its specification is publicly accessible at the OMG website. functional areas including the Read, Query, Update, History,
As of April 2014, the CTS2 version 1.1 is the latest version Maintenance, and Temporal services.
released [6].
The CTS2 specification specifies the information models
for the terminological artifacts. These artifacts include:
• Code System Catalog – metadata about code systems
(ontologies, code sets, thesauri, classification systems,
etc.) (See Fig. 2)
• Code System Version Catalog - metadata about specific
versions of code systems.
• Entity Description - a set of entity (aka. “class”, “category”,
“concept”, “predicate”, “property”, “term”, “individual”)
identifiers known to the service along with information
about which code system versions make assertions about
these identifiers and what they say.
• Association - sets of “semantic” assertions about entity
identifiers, in which the entity identifier may play the role
of subject, predicate (verb) or object in the assertions.
• Value Set Catalog - metadata about sets of entity identifiers
(value sets) that have been grouped for some purpose. Fig. 2. Code System Catalog Information Model.
• Value Set Definition - information about how value sets are III. PROFILING ICD TERMINOLOGICAL CONTENT
constructed.
We analyzed the existing WHO ICD content services, and
profiled the ICD-11 terminological content using the CTS2
35
ICBO 2014 Proceedings
information models of Code System Catalog, Code System versioning information, so the same URI is used for both the
Version Catalog, Entity Description and Association. We code system and the code system version for now. 2) ICD-11
identified the mappings of the properties between the two Morbidity Beta (http://id.who.int/release/11/beta/morbidity) is the
service models and suggested the CTS2 properties that are current version of the code system ICD-11 Morbidity; 3)
important for ICD-11 but currently missing from the existing ICD10 has two version: ICD10 2010
service implementation. (http://id.who.int/release/10/2010) and ICD10 2008
(http://id.who.int/release/10/2008), in which ICD10 2010 is the
A. Code System Catalog current version of the code system ICD10.
We identified three code systems from the existing WHO
Table 3. Profiling by the CTS2 Code System Version Catalog model.
ICD content services: 1) ICD-11 Foundation
(http://id.who.int/icd/entity) that corresponds to the Top Level of
Properties in CTS2 Properties in ICD
the Foundation category in Table 1; 2) ICD-11 Morbidity
codeSystemVersionName Suggested for ICD
(http://id.who.int/release/11/morbidity) that corresponds to the Top
versionOf Suggested for ICD
Level of the ICD-11 Linerizations without minor version in
imports
Table 1; and 3) ICD10 (http://id.who.int/release/10) that
defaultLanguage Suggested for ICD
corresponds to the Top Level of the ICD10 without minor
supportedLanguage Suggested for ICD
version. Table 2 shows the mappings of the properties between
assoications
the ICD code systems and the CTS2 Code System Catalog
entityDescriptions
model. We also suggested 5 properties shown in red
classes
(codeSystemName, resourceType, resourceSynopsis, rights
individuals
and entryState) that may be important for describing the ICD
roles
code systems.
documentURI
Table 2. Profiling by the CTS2 Code System Catalog model. sourceAndNotatoin
predecessor
Properties in CTS2 Properties in ICD
officialResourceVersionId Title
codeSystemName Suggested for ICD
officialReleaseDate Suggested for ICD
codeSystemCategory
officialActivationDate
ontologyDomain
state
ontologyType
about URI
designedForOntologyTask
describedResourceType
hasOntologyLanguage
resourceID
includes
formalName Title
versions version
keyword
currentVersion latestVersion
resourceType Suggested for ICD
usedOntologyEngineeringTool
resourceSynopsis Definition
releaseDocumenation
additionalDocumentations
releaseFormat
sourceAndRole
about URI
rights Suggested for ICD
describedResourceType
note
resourceID
property
formalName Title
alternateID
keyword sourceStatements
resourceType Suggested for ICD entyrID
resourceSynopsis Suggested for ICD entryState Suggested for ICD
additionalDocumentations status Suggested for ICD
sourceAndRole Table 3 shows the mappings of the properties between the
rights Suggested for ICD ICD code system versions and the CTS2 Code System Version
note
Catalog model. We also suggested 9 CTS2 properties shown in
property
red that may be important for describing the ICD code system
alternateID
versions.
sourceStatements
entryID C. Entity Description
entryState Suggested for ICD For the individual entities in each code system version, we
status
used the CTS2 Entity Description model for the profiling.
B. Code System Version Catalog Table 4 shows the mappings of the properties between the
We identified the code system versions for each of three individual entities and the CTS2 Entity Description model.
existing ICD code systems. 1) ICD-11 Foundation Beta We also suggest four additional CTS2 properties shown in red
(http://id.who.int/icd/entity) is the current version of the code (describingCodeSystemVersion, ancestors, descendants and
system ICD-11 Foundation. Note that for the code system ICD- entityType) that may be important for describing an individual
11 Foundation, the existing WHO services do not provide any ICD-11 entity.
36
ICBO 2014 Proceedings
compliant rendering using CTS2 Development Framework
Table 4. Profiling by the CTS2 Entity Description model. APIs [10].
Property in CTS2 Property in ICD Note that the CTS2 Development Framework is a
entityDescriptionType development kit for rapidly creating CTS2 compliant
about URI applications. The CTS2 Development Framework provides a
entityID ID, Code REST web application, along with URL routing and parameter
handling. The CTS2 Development Framework has been
alternateEntityID successfully used to build a NCBO BioPortal Wrapper service
describingCodeSystemVersion Suggested for ICD that provide a layer of standardized CTS2 signatures to existing
codeSystemRole biomedical ontologies available in BioPortal.
designation Title, Synonym Table 5 shows a set of service signatures proposed for the
definition Definition, Long Definition implementation of an ICD-11 CTS2 Services Wrapper. The
example wrapper services cover those terminological artifacts presented
note in the section III. The detailed examples of each service for the
Narrower Term, Inclusion, prototype implementation can be accessed at:
Exclusion, Index Terms, Class
property Kind, Coding Hint http://informatics.mayo.edu/rest2/project/icd11/cts2/doc.
sourceStatements
Table 5. A set of services proposed for the implementation of the
Body Site, Body System, Causal ICD-11 CTS2 Services Wrapper.
Agents, Causal Mechanisms,
Signs And Symptoms, Genomic Signature Description
Characteristics, Investigation Code System Catalog
Findings, Type, Intent, Activity codesystems Return all named code systems in
when Injured, Object or ICD11
Substance Producing Injury, codesystembyuri?uri={uri} Read catalog entry for {uri}
Mechanism of Injury, Place of Code System Version Catalog
Occurrence, Substance Use (by codesystemversionsbyuri?uri={uri Return all known versions of the
} named code system by {uri}
subjectOf CTS2 Association Directory)
codesystemversionbyuri?uri={uri} Read code system version catalog
predicateOf entry for {uri}
targetOf Entity Description
parent Parent (by CTS2 Entity Reference) entitybyuri?uri={uri} Read a synopsis for the referenced
parents Parent (by CTS2 Entity Directory) entity URI
ancestors Suggested for ICD Association Directories
children Child (by CTS2 Entity Directory) entitysubjectofbyuri?uri={uri} Return all associations having the
named entity as the subject.
descendants Suggested for ICD
Entity Directories
entityType Suggested for ICD entityparentsbyuri?uri={uri} Return a list of entities that are
instances "parents" (target of
equivalentEntity skos:broaderTransitive relationship)
of the named concept.
D. Association entityancestorsbyuri?uri={uri} Return a list of entities that are
As mentioned in the section above, the CTS2 Association ancestors (transitive target of
skos:broaderTransitive relationship)
represents sets of “semantic” assertions about entity identifiers, of the named concept.
in which the entity identifier may play the role of subject,
predicate (verb) or object in the assertions. In fact, the entitychildrenbyuri?uri={uri} Return a list of entities that are direct
properties “subjectOf”, “predicateOf”, “targetOf”, “parents”, children (target of
“children”, “ancestors” and “descendants” in the CTS2 Entity skos:narrowerTransitive relationship)
of the named concept.
Description model (see Table 4) are such sets of assertions
utilizing the Association model. Specifically, the CTS2 entitydescendantsbyuri?uri={uri} Return a list of entities that are
Association Directory model is used for the semantics asserted descendants (transitive target of
for the property “subjectOf” and the CTS2 Entity Directory skos:narrowerTransitive relationship)
of the named concept.
model is used for the semantics asserted for the rest of four
properties.
IV. PROTOYPE IMPLEMENTATION V. DISCUSSION
Based on the mappings identified and the new properties In this paper, we describe our efforts in profiling the ICD-
suggested in the section above, we have initiated a prototype 11 terminological content exposed by existing WHO services
implementation by building a CTS2 services wrapper for ICD- using the CTS2 standard specification. The profiling results
11. The wrapper takes a URI from existing WHO ICD content revealed a number of areas in the existing WHO ICD content
services as input, and extracts RDF-based content (by content services, which can potentially be enriched by the CTS2
negotiation) using the Jena API [9], and develops the CTS2- standard.
37
ICBO 2014 Proceedings
First, we found that ICD-11 Foundation, as a code system Fourth, CTS2 is designed to address a broad range of
from the CTS2 perspective, does not have a versioning requirements within the ontology and terminology community.
mechanism in the existing WHO services. The existing WHO In addition to the specification about the four kinds of
service implementation was based on a specific use case terminological artifacts addressed by this paper, CTS2
assumption that all the linearization releases (e.g., ICD-11 specifications also have the notions of Value Set Catalog,
Morbidity) should refer to versionless foundation entity URIs Value Set Definition and Map Catalog. Although the existing
so that different linearizations created at different times could WHO services have not exposed any such terminological
be anchored by the foundation entity URIs. However, when we artifacts, these artifacts (e.g., value sets) have been actively
consider the entire life cycle of ICD-11 content authoring, the utilized in the ICD-11 revision process. Actually, a collection
versioning mechanism is a critical component for the authoring of value sets (including Body Systems, Anatomical Sites,
applications that would need to access version specific Functioning, etc.) had been developed and utilized in support
foundation entities or history of changes. We propose that of the ICD-11 revision. In a previous study, we developed and
WHO may consider a model similar to that used by SNOMED evaluated approaches to value set extraction from SNOMED
CT which allows for both fine-grained and coarse versioning. CT for the ICD-11 anatomy use case [11]. We consider that
Specifically, revisions to the SNOMED CT are released twice CTS2 would play a key role in enabling the standard
a year and marked by the release date, e.g., the version representation and dissemination of such terminological
20140131. In a fine-grained level in the Release Format 2 artifacts in the future.
(RF2) of SNOMED CT [8], each component has its effective
time and active status to indicate versioning mechanism. The In summary, CTS2 standard specification is a very useful
tool for profiling the ICD-11 terminology content. The
CTS2 Code System and Code System Version models contain
rich metadata for representing such versioning mechanism. outcome produced by this profiling would potentially enrich
the WHO ICD-11 content representation and enable a robust
Second, we identify three code systems and their and standards-based content services to better support the ICD-
corresponding code system versions from the existing WHO 11 revision applications.
services, while we also find that these important terminological
artifacts are generally underspecified. In addition to identifying ACKNOWLEDGMENT
the property mappings, we suggest 5 properties from the CTS2 This work is partly supported by a Mayo-WHO Contract
Code System Catalog model and 9 properties from the CTS2 200822195-1.
Code System Version Catalog model for describing these ICD-
11 terminological artifacts. For example, we suggest property REFERENCES
“rights” for the artifacts because it will make the WHO rights
statement explicit . Such statement will be critical for providing [1] International Classification of Diseases (ICD) :
the guidance to the user community for the use of ICD-11 that http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/; Last visited at April 17,
is critical to the users. We also suggest the properties 2014.
“defaultLanguage” and “supportedLanguage” for the ICD-11 [2] ICD-11 Content Models in UML: http://informatics.mayo.edu/icdmodel.
because the multilingual support is one of major goals for the Last visited at April 17, 2014.
ICD-11 revision and eventually at least the six official United [3] Agreement between IHTSDO and WHO URL:
Nations languages will need to be supported. http://www.who.int/classifications/AnnouncementLetter.pdf. Last
visited at April 17, 2014.
Third, those ICD properties (such as Body System, Causal [4] Jiang G, Solbrig HR, Chute CG. Building Standardized Semantic Web
Agents, etc.) that will have values from external terminologies RESTful Services to Support ICD-11 Revision. Proceedings of the 5th
(e.g., SNOMED CT, ICF) are mapped to the CTS2 property International Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Tools for
“subjectOf”, which can be elegantly described by the Life Sciences. Paris, France, November 28-30, 2012. Accessible from
http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-952/paper_24.pdf;
Association Directory model. Note that the existing WHO
[5] CTS2 Wiki: http://informatics.mayo.edu/cts2/; Last visited at April 17,
services have not exposed the external identifiers for those 2014.
values annotated by external terminologies. For example, as [6] OMG CTS2 1.1: http://www.omg.org/spec/CTS2/1.1/; Last visited at
shown in Fig. 1, the property icd:bodySite in the foundation April 17, 2014.
entity “Acute myocardial infarction” has the value [7] Linked Data – Design issues:
“Myocardium structure (body structure)” in a textual string. http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html; Last visited at April
The original unique identifier from SNOMED CT (i.e., 17, 2014.
http://snomed.info/id/74281007) is not exposed in the existing [8] SNOMED CT Technical Implementation Guide :
services. In addition, CTS2 uses the Entity Directory model to http://ihtsdo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/doc/download/doc_TechnicalIm
plementationGuide_Current-en-US_INT_20140131.pdf; Last visited at
describe the semantics for the properties “parents”, “children”, April 7, 2014.
“ancestors” and “descendants” in the CTS2 Entity Description
[9] Jena API: https://jena.apache.org/; Last visited at April 17, 2014.
model. We found that the existing WHO services do not have a
[10] CTS2 Development Framework:
mechanism to retrieve the transitive closure for parent (i.e., http://informatics.mayo.edu/cts2/framework/; Last visited at April 17,
skos:broaderTransitive) or child (skos:narrowerTransitive) 2014.
relationships to get all ancestors or descendants for a specific [11] Jiang G, Solbrig HR, Chalmers RJG, Spackman K, Rector AL, Chute
ICD entity. This is an area that would need to be enhanced in CG. A case study of ICD-11 anatomy value set extraction from
the future. SNOMED CT. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 2011; 833:133-8.
38