The Snapper Platform is an Eclipse-based application designed to support describing the meaning of terms in existing clinical terminologies using concepts or expressions from SNOMED CT. However Snapper is not bound to SNOMED CT, and other ontologies can be used as an alternate target ontology.

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Semantic Mappings to SNOMED CT^™

The SNOMED CT ontology has been identified world-wide as the standard clinical terminology to be used when collecting clinical information about a patients treatment yet whilst vast, its coverage can be patchy, particularly in specialist areas. To ease the adoption of SNOMED CT for clinical data collection, it may be desirable to create a semantic mapping from an existing set of terms to SNOMED CT. In opther words, to specify specifically the relationship between a term and a single SNOMED CT concept, or an expression composed of multiple concepts.

Snapper allows a list of ad-hoc terminology source terms from an existing data set to be imported and mapped to SNOMED CT using SNOMED's post-coordination expression syntax. Realising from the outset that post-coordination of concepts is difficult, an expression editor was designed with features similar to a smart program editor, such as colour-coded syntax highlighting, automatic description completion and a templating engine driven by the SNOMED CT concept model.

Features

• The Automap feature attempts to automatically generate the simplest of mapping expressions - a one to one mapping which can cut down the mapping workload considerably. Additionally, users can write a script to perform some of their own mapping, allowing for handling of common abbreviations or other features specific to the source terminology.

• Drag and drop of concepts into the expression editor from the search results view and the graphical visualization was added as a first step to supporting a direct manipulation approach to composing expressions.
• Many people interact with SNOMED CT terms and not the underlying concept identifiers. Concept identifiers feature heavily in our expression editor, and whilst this conforms to the official SNOMED CT documentation, alternative visual representations supporting user interfaces metaphors such as direct manipulation will better cater for this group of users.
• Many users have no experience with the SNOMED CT compositional grammar and the syntax is somewhat obscure and unintuitive. Ideally the editor should handle these details of the grammar and support the user's goals of identifying the focus concept for mapping and then mediate its subsequent refinement based on the Concept Model constraints.
• There are general mapping patterns, akin to software design patterns, that represent a set of best practices in mapping, developed over time. To assist in the authoring of mappings with reproducible quality and ease repetitive mapping tasks, the tool should support user-specified workflows and templates to capture these patterns.

Last Updated on Wednesday, 05 October 2011 08:28