Machine Readable Concept Model

Snow Owl supports a formal concept model--a set of rules that govern how concepts can be modeled. As an initial set of concept model rules, we have incorporated the first and only release from the IHTSDO Machine Readable Concept Model (MRCM) Project Group from October 2009.

We have additionally expanded the scope of the IHTSDO concept model to include support for reference sets, descriptions, and concrete datatypes.

In the following discussion, we will use the terms from the MRCM PG.

Concept model constraints

Each constraint contains a description and additional metadata indicating the constraint author and effective date.

Constraints can be specified at the strengths identified by the MRCM PG:

Constraints can be applied to the following forms:

Concept set definitions

Concept set definitions are used for defining the constraint domain and the range of acceptable values and types of a relationship predicate. The MRCM PG release includes concept set definitions defined by specifying a concept and whether to include its descendants. We have added two more concept set definition types:

Concept model predicates

Concept model predicates constrain the relationships, descriptions, and concrete datatypes for a particular concept model domain. The predicates allow defining:

Constraint import/export

We have imported the MRCM PG Phase I (October 2009) release as an initial concept model. The MRCM rules can be exported both in XML and CSV formats by selecting the File>Export...>Snow Owl>MRCM rules menu item.