Dear all
An opportunity has been identified to further improve the Release schedule for the SNOMED CT Spanish Edition package. Currently the Spanish Edition Release is published on 31st March + 30th September each year, which were the new dates designed to reduce the time between the dependent International Edition + the Publication of the Spanish Edition package. Now that this has been trialled and confirmed to be of benefit, we have further analysed the dates to identify what would be most helpful to the Spanish Edition users.
The conclusion was that users can most likely benefit from moving our release closer to theirs, rather than moving them earlier and continuing using the "January" and "July" International releases as the dependent versions. This is because the majority of users of the Spanish Edition are not able to change their release dates to bring them forward, in order to take advantage of the additional time gained by us releasing the Spanish Edition a month earlier.
Therefore, instead of continuing the refine the process down to release the Spanish Edition earlier each year, we will instead cut off the translations much later in the cycle, in order to allow us to use a later International Edition as the baseline (September or even October, for example). This will allow many more translations to get into each Spanish Edition release, but still allow the users to retain their own Release dates.
The proposed new dates for the Spanish Edition release each year are therefore:
- May 10th + November 10th
- They would be dependent upon much later International Edition releases than in previous years - for example April 1st + October 1st (rather than January or July)
- The first release to use the new dates would be targeted for 10th May 2025
We will transition to this new release schedule as planned, unless we receive any critical objections in the meantime. If you have any concerns or questions on these proposed changes, please let us know on release@snomed.org, or by responding to this message directly.
Kind regards,
Andrew Atkinson | Release Manager