New Features

Concept creation

It's now much easier to create a concept from an existing parent or sibling. Relevant descriptions and properties will be cloned on the new concept so that you can quickly modify only the fields that have changed. The concept model is also used to display entry fields for description types, relationships, and datatype properties that are specified as either mandatory or optional.

Add new child concept

This action will create a new concept as the child of the selected concept. The descriptions and properties will be copied from the selected concept to the new child concept.

Create new sibling

This action will create a new concept as a sibling of the selected concept. The descriptions and properties will be copied from the selected concept to the new sibling concept.

Concept editor

The concept editor's overview page now includes information on the concept's descriptions, relationships, and datatype properties.

Concept editor overview page

Descriptions section

Overview

This section displays the descriptions associated with the concept. The flag on the section heading indicates the currently active language dialect (here en-sg). The section can be opened or closed using the small triangle next to the flag.

Concept editor overview page - descriptions section

The descriptions section will automatically create entry fields for all description types in the concept model. For example, if the concept model requires two "Search keyword" description types to be present based on the concept's parentage or reference set membership, then two "Search keyword" fields would appear in this section. A description tag icon allows adding additional unsanctioned (i.e. not defined in the concept model) descriptions to the concept.

The left column indicates the description type (here: Fully Specified Name, Full Name, Synonym, and Short Name). The description term is located on the right, and will format to display on multiple lines for longer descriptions. A green icon indicates the preferred term.

Tooltip

Hovering the cursor over one of the descriptions will display a tooltip with additional details.

Description tooltip

Actions

Clicking on the blue triangle next to a description will display a list of actions that can be performed on the description.

Description section actions

Available actions include:

Properties section

Overview

This section displays the concept's relationships and datatype properties.

Concept editor overview page - properties section

The properties section will automatically create entry fields for all relationships and datatype properties specified in the concept model. For example, if the concept model specifies that a dose form relationship must be present, an entry field for dose form will appear in this section (see screenshot above). Any value constraints will also be honored; in the example we see members of a dose form reference set displayed. Constraints can also affect the relationship group that the properties appear in; for more details please refer to the concept model help.

Unsanctioned property groups can be added to the properties section by clicking the Add unsanctioned property group action in the Properties section. Within each property group, additional unsanctioned relationships can be added by pressing the Add unsanctioned property action in title section of the desired property group. Similarly, unsanctioned datatype properties can be added by using the calculator icon.

The left column indicates the property type (here: Is a, Active ingredient, and Dose form). The property value is displayed on the right.

Tooltip

Hovering the cursor over one of the properties will display a tooltip with additional details.

Properties tooltip for a relationship

Actions

Clicking on the blue triangle next to a property will display a list of actions that can be performed on the property.

Please note that the concept model may influence the actions that are available for a particular property. For example, the "Clinically significant" Boolean datatype pictured below only has the option to clone and retire the relationship. That is because the concept model specifies that one and only one "Clinically significant" property may appear. Therefore cloning the property is not allowed (as there would then be two priorities) and neither is retiring the property (as there would then be zero properties).

Property section actions

Available actions include:

SNOMED CT Properties section

Overview

This section displays the concept's SNOMED CT properties. The fields in this section are always the same.

Concept editor overview page - SNOMED CT properties section

Actions

Clicking the blue triangle next to a SNOMED CT property will display a list of actions that can be performed on the property. The available actions vary depending on the property.

Definition status action

The status property's actions allow inactivating or deleting a concept (depending on its publication status). Available actions:

The definition status property action allows setting a concept to primitive or fully defined.

The subclass definitions property is an advanced description logic feature that declares that all subclasses of the current concept are mutually disjoint. Unless you are doing research on extending the expressivity currently used by SNOMED CT, you do not need to modify this setting.

Error message display

Error, warning, and informational messages are now displayed at the top of the concept editor. Clicking the hyperlink displays the messages, you can click on one of the messages to jump to this point in the concept editor.

Error message display

Unpublished changes

Unpublished changes are now indicated by displaying a box around their entry. For example, in the Copy of: Administrative statuses concept displayed above, the Fully Specified Name field is unpublished. Once a concept has been published, only the text appears, as below.

Concept editor displaying the SNOMED CT concept

Reference set editor

Since the reference set editor uses the same components as the concept editor, it also includes the new concept editing features.

New reference set editor

RF1 subset import

Subsets in RF1 format can now be imported and will be transformed to a SNOMED CT RF2 simple type reference set. Only the concepts from the RF1 subset that are found in the current terminology will be imported; new concepts are not created as part of the RF1 subset import.

Select RF1 reference sets to import

Following the import, a results page summarizes any problems with the import. The results can also be exported to a file for later review.

Import results

International version of CMT

We have included simple type reference sets based on the RF1 releases of Kaiser Permanente's Convergent Medical Terminology. These include subsets of SNOMED CT concepts relevant to particular specialties, which are useful to increase their search relevancy in Snow Owl's search profiles. Only the concepts that were found in the SNOMED CT international release were included in these reference sets.

Kaiser Permanente's Convergent Medical Terminology

Concept model changes

We have continued to add additional rules to the concept model. These rules are based on the draft IHTSDO Machine Readable Concept Model (MRCM) specifications, but also express de facto rules that are not formally expressed.

Concept model editor displaying some new rules

We have also added a warning message to the concept editors that indicate if a property is unsanctioned with respect to the concept model.

Editor warnings

Relevancy improvements

Term location now influences scoring of partially completed search terms. For example, searching for en co or will prefer matches that start with terms in this order. In this case, the first two matching results are Enteric-Coated Oral Capsule and Enteric-Coated Oral Tablet.

Search relevancy improvements

New search profiles

Several new search profiles have been added to improve the rankings of quick search results based on specialty or application. You can activate a search profile by choosing Preferences > Snow Owl > Search Profiles.

New specialty-based search profiles

New profiles include:

Description logic features

Equivalency checking on save

A new option on the concept editor lets you check to see if a new concept is equivalent to an existing concept's definition. This equivalency check is performed using the description logic reasoner set in Preferences > Snow Owl > Reasoners.

Equivalency checking action

Quick fix for equivalency errors

We now offer a "quick fix" for equivalent concepts. Following classification, equivalency errors are displayed in the problems view. You can now select one or more concepts to quick fix, which simply changes the defined status on the offending concept to primitive.

Quick-fixing an equivalency error

This is useful to bypass known errors following programmatic generation of large ontologies.

ELK 0.3.0

ELK is Snow Owl's default description logic reasoner. In addition to being the fastest reasoner for SNOMED CT in the world, ELK provides partial support for concrete domains, which are becoming increasingly important to represent national drug dictionary extensions.

Yevgeny Kazakov (ELK) & Brandon Ulrich (Snow Owl)

This release of Snow Owl includes the latest ELK 0.3.0, which includes support for additional OWL EL constructs. ELK now supports EL++ restricted to safe nominals (see Practical Reasoning with Nominals in the EL Family of Description Logics) with partial support for concrete roles.

Concept constructors:

Axiom types:

FaCT++ 1.6.0

Snow Owl also bundles FaCT++ 1.6.0, which supports OWL DL and provides partial support for OWL 2. FaCT++ supports universal restrictions, negation, and disjunction, and is currently the best choice if your Snow Owl ontology makes use of these constructs.

Reasoners preference page