Page History

In some situations, some parts of When values within a SNOMED CT expression, expression constraint or query are not known unknown at the time of authoring. In these situations, the a SNOMED CT Template Syntax template may be used, . The SNOMED CT template syntax can be used in conjunction with the appropriate language syntax, to represent a template of a specific typeSNOMED CT computable languages to create SNOMED CT template languages for this purpose. For example:

• Using the Template Syntax template syntax with SNOMED CT Compositional Grammarcompositional grammar enables the representation of ‘Expression Templates’; expression templates
• Using the Template Syntax with template syntax with the SNOMED CT Expression Constraint Language expression constraint language enables the representation of ‘Expression Constraint Templates’; and expression constraint templates

• Using the Template Syntax with template syntax with the SNOMED CT Query Languagequery language

  Footnote Macro
  Please note that the SNOMED CT

  Query Language

  query language is not yet available.

   enables the representation of ‘Query Templates’.

...

• query templates.

This version of the SNOMED CT template syntax specifically focuses on supporting two important use cases in which the SNOMED CT template syntax is needed. In particular to support:

• Authoring of precoordinated concepts
• Defining consistent postcoordinated expressions

These use cases specifically require the use of slots within SNOMED CT Compositional Grammar. Therefore, this version of the specification focuses primarily on supporting the use of the template syntax within the context of the Expression Template Language. Future versions of this specification will explore other use cases, and additional template languages (e.g. the Expression Constraint Template Language) serve slightly different purposes. The following sections describe the key use cases for each of these template types.