Build-up of Terminology Services for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) – part two: conceptual engineering

This paper is the second part of the adjoined papers describing the chain of thoughts leading to plan and implement a terminology system at ECDC – describing the conceptual model of the ECDC terminology system, which is built on a formal ontology backbone. ECDC – an EU scientific agency with the scope of preventing and controlling communicable disease – is an organisation started in 2005. In it’s short history it has initiated the build-up of a number of information systems – services in parallel. In part one, reasoning was given for a common, shared terminology service, providing proper interface both for human and machine users. Such a service seemed to be the proper tool ensuring a consistent conceptual space among the different systems, notably ensuring transparency and cross-search ability. This paper explains the conceptual modelling in the form of a formal ontology as the conceptual backbone for so called value sets representing terminology sources. The value sets are modelled in SKOS.