Overview

The terminology service provides a repository of codes and terminology standards to serve as a common and consistent reference among various health systems and providers.

It is intended in RHEA to provide services both on a back-end systems level, as well as on a user level.

The RHEA TS provides the following interfaces

A publicly accessible website where users can browse and download the terminology sets in use online
A back-end web service so that the TS can be integrated into the larger RHEA HIE
Maintenance tools that allow the importing, updating and editing of terminology sets

Apelon DTS has been chosen as the software for use as core of the terminology service, while Jembi developed the public website.

Apelon DTS contains the following components

Server: This core component of the TS and provides the basic terminology services.
DTS Editor: This is a front-end application that is used to interface with the DTS server and maintain the loaded terminology sets.

Terminology Sets

See Terminology Code Sets for a list of the code sets in use.

DTS provides various tools for the loading of terminologies. DTS Editor can be used to directly add individual terms and concepts, while the Import Wizard plugin can be used for the bulk loading of terminology sets.

Import Wizard

The Import Wizard plugin for DTS is a powerful tool for the loading of terminology sets. It is available at http://apelon-dts.sourceforge.net/download.html#DTS_Downloads. It can be used for the bulk loading of terminology sets from plain text (csv or tab delimited) or excel import files.

To import a terminology set using this tool, a import specification needs to be specified for the import file. This spec is used to define the mappings between columns in the import file, and term attributes. Some existing specs for the RHEA code sets are available in subversion.

Technical Structure

Along with the DTS server, the TS also hosts a Tomcat Java Application Server and an Apache web server.

The Tomcat server hosts a Jembi API abstraction layer that interfaces to the DTS server via its Java APIs.
The Apache server hosts the website, which was developed in PHP using the Twitter Bootstrap Framework. The website interfaces to the API layer on the Tomcat server using PHP/Java Bridge.

Installation and Development

See the following guides:

as well as the documentation available at http://apelon-dts.sourceforge.net/documents.html for installation details.

The source code for the Jembi components are available in subversion. There are three sub-projects.

API: The abstraction layer.
WebUI: The web browser.
ImportData: Contains raw import data and scripts for various terminology sets in use.

The API layer makes use of the DTS Java APIs. Some useful links for developing against those:

See this page for details on the interoperability back-end service.