ISO 17117-1:2025

Overview

ISO 17117-1:2025 - Health informatics - Terminological resources - Part 1: Characteristics defines the characteristics and functional roles of health terminological resources intended primarily for clinical concept representation. The standard helps users determine whether a terminology provides the properties and functions needed for specific healthcare applications, and it establishes a framework for categorizing terminological resources based on those characteristics. It does not provide evaluation criteria, mapping quality assessments, terminology server requirements, or computational biology terminology characteristics.

Key topics and technical characteristics

ISO 17117-1:2025 focuses on the technical features that make terminologies fit for clinical use. Important topics include:

• Identifiers and versioning

  • Term identifiers, concept identifiers, context‑free identifiers, persistence of identifiers, and version identifiers.
  • Editorial metadata, obsolete marking and responsiveness for maintenance.

• Concept representation and semantics

  • Concept orientation and formal concept representation (including compositionality).
  • Semantic consistency, hierarchical relations, associative relations, and categorial structure.

• Extensibility and coverage

  • Mechanisms to specify more detailed concepts and to broaden coverage across clinical domains.

• Aggregation and classification

  • Characteristics relevant for data aggregation: mutual exclusiveness, exhaustiveness, and mapping considerations to classification systems.

• Functions enabled by characteristics

  • Data capture, display/presentation/identification, data aggregation for statistics, reasoning (including internal consistency checks), and maintenance functions such as concept permanence and version control.

Practical applications and target users

ISO 17117-1:2025 is practical for organizations and professionals who must choose, develop, or manage health terminologies:

• Healthcare organizations and IT teams selecting terminologies for electronic health records (EHRs), registries, clinical decision support, reporting and analytics.
• Terminology developers and vendors designing or extending clinical coding systems.
• Standards bodies and standards developers creating interoperable terminologies and metadata models.
• Independent evaluators, researchers and terminology Registration Authorities who need a characteristics‑based framework to categorize terminologies.

Use the standard to identify which technical characteristics matter for your use case (e.g., persistent identifiers for longitudinal data, compositionality for detailed clinical expression, or hierarchical relations for analytics).

Related standards

• ISO 17117 series (other parts cover requirements and evaluation methods).
• ISO 17115 (referenced as background on health terminology scope).

Keywords: ISO 17117-1:2025, health informatics, terminological resources, clinical concept representation, semantic interoperability, terminology management, concept identifiers, versioning, compositionality.