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SNOMED CT provides both hierarchies and formal concept definitions to allow a range of advanced query techniques. SNOMED CT queries can be performed over different sets of terminology artefacts (known as the substrate of the query), including:

• The precoordinated components distributed as part of the SNOMED CT international edition;
• The precoordinated components distributed by a local release centre as part of a national or local SNOMED CT edition;
• The postcoordinated expressions stored within an expression repository; or
• The SNOMED CT expressions stored within an Electronic Health Record (EHR).

The SNOMED CT Expression Constraint Language enables simple queries over SNOMED CT content to be expressed. These queries may be performed for a range of purposes, including the authoring and quality assurance of new SNOMED CT content, the design and development of extensional reference sets, and the design and display of SNOMED CT subsets in clinical user interfaces. While the language itself does not support querying over the full EHR content, the SNOMED CT Expression Constraint Language could be embedded within record-based query languages (such as SQL) to represent the terminological aspects of these queries.