ISO 17117-1:2018

Overview

ISO 17117-1:2018 - Health informatics - Terminological resources - Part 1: Characteristics defines the characteristics and functions of health terminological resources designed primarily for clinical concept representation. Its purpose is to help users and developers assess whether a terminology provides the features needed for specific healthcare applications. The standard emphasizes categorization by characteristics and functions rather than by system name, supporting consistent evaluation and selection of terminologies for interoperability and data quality.

Key technical topics and requirements

ISO 17117-1:2018 documents universal and specialized characteristics. Major topics include:

• Identifiers and concept/term representation
  • Term identifier and concept identifier requirements (uniqueness, canonical expression)
  • Concept orientation and clear separation between concept and linguistic term
• Extensibility and coverage
  • Mechanisms to specify more detailed concepts and to broaden concept coverage
• Aggregation and classification properties
  • Requirements around mutual exclusiveness, exhaustiveness, and suitability for data aggregation or classification
• Formal representation and semantic interoperability
  • Compositionality (constructing complex concepts)
  • Hierarchical relations, associative relations, categorial structure
  • Semantic consistency across the resource
• Maintenance and governance
  • Context-free and persistent identifiers, version identifiers
  • Editorial metadata, obsolete marking, and responsiveness to change
• Functions invoked by characteristics
  • Support for data capture, display/presentation/identification, data aggregation/statistics, reasoning, and maintenance functions (e.g., version control, concept permanence)

Note: the standard explicitly excludes evaluation processes, quality of mappings between terminologies or versions, terminology server requirements, and computational biology characteristics.

Practical applications and who uses this standard

ISO 17117-1:2018 is practical for:

• Healthcare organizations selecting terminologies for Electronic Health Records (EHRs), clinical registries, or reporting systems
• Developers of terminological systems and terminology standards
• Terminology Registration Authorities and governance bodies defining release/version policies
• Independent evaluators and academic reviewers assessing fit-for-purpose characteristics
• Implementers focusing on semantic interoperability, accurate clinical data capture, and reliable longitudinal data migration

Adopting ISO 17117-1 helps ensure terminologies support data consistency, aggregation for analytics, clinical decision support, and safe exchange between systems.

Related standards

• ISO 1087-1 (terminology and definitions) - referenced for foundational terms
• ISO/TS 17117 (2002) - superseded by this revision
• International Classification of Diseases (ICD) - often mapped to clinical terminologies (mapping quality is out of scope but relevant to evaluations)

Keywords: ISO 17117-1:2018, health informatics, terminological resources, terminology characteristics, concept identifier, term identifier, semantic interoperability, compositionality, terminology maintenance.