Comparing versions

Comparing versions is available for each terminology for which version can be created, namely the following:

Starting a comparison

The compare versions wizard can be invoked at Tools > Compare Versions... or directly from the toolbar .

Opening the version compare wizard

Select the terminology of the version for comparison.

Select terminology for the compare

Select the two versions that you want to compare from the drop-down menu. The Source version has to be an earlier version than the Destination version. If you made changes, the latest state of the ontology is called MAIN. Click Finish to start the comparison.

Select versions to compare

Now you can see the differences between the selected versions in the compare editor.

Compare editor

The compare editor is organized into three sections, which are described below. The size of the sections and the columns can be adjusted by dragging their edges. The names of the compared versions are displayed in the tab of the editor and also in the title.

Version compare editor displaying results

Change summary section

The Change summary section displays an overview of the number of new, modified, and deleted components between versions. In the figure below, you can see that between the 2013-07-31 and 2014-01-31 versions of SNOMED CT 2,225 components have been added, 16,284 components have been modified and no components have been deleted. Inactivated components are subsumed as modifications.

Summary of the changes between two versions

Changed components section

The Changed components section displays a hierarchical tree of changed concepts, which can be expanded and contracted to view child concepts. Decorators and font color indicate the nature of the change:

Unchanged components are in grey font.

Selecting a concept displays additional detailed information about the change in the right-hand section.

A hierarchical overview of the updated components

Click the collapse all nodes button to collapse the tree to its original view.

You can display the result as a tree or as a flat list by using the toggle button . In the flat list view, results can by sorted by clicking on the column headers. The first column (Components) allows sorting by type of change, the second columns (Label) lists the concepts alphabetically.

List view of the changed components

Click the funnel icon to filter the results by the displayed categories. For example, if you are comparing two SNOMED CT versions, you can display only the concepts that were inactivated.

Filtering compare results

Change details section

If you are interested in a particular concept, click on the concept in the Changed components section. This will display additional information about the change in the Change details section on the right side, which now contains the following columns:

The columns can be sorted by clicking on the header.

Change details for non-human reference set

Exporting change details

To export the content of the compare editor as a text file, click on the export button in the toolbar of the compare editor. The delimiter separated text file can be imported into Excel.

Exporting change details

The destination file can be opened using Excel.

Exported change details in Excel