Build-up of Terminology Services for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) – part one: enterprise- and functional-level planning

ECDC (an EU scientific agency with the scope of preventing and controlling communicable diseases) is an organization started in 2005. ECDC has initiated the build-up of a number of domain specific information systems in parallel. A common, shared terminology service, providing proper interface both for human and machine clients seemed to be the proper tool towards conceptual consistency (later interoperability) among the different systems, notably ensuring transparency and cross-search ability in the quickly accumulating communicable diseases related data, information and knowledge. There will be internal and external machine clients of the terminology service, as the new European communicable disease surveillance system (TESSy), the epidemics intelligence supporting information systems (EPIS, TTT3), the ECDC WEB site, the Eurosurveillance journal, the Knowledge and Information service (KISatECDC4) etc. The human users will be internal and external experts, the public health and the communicable disease scientific community. This paper describes the enterprise and functional level planning of the terminology services, the necessary decisions ECDC were faced at and the planned process to build up services. As it was found that there will be a need for long term, strictly maintained, conceptually clear terminology handling to ensure consistency and expendability, the build-up of an ontology backbone became a core part of planning. The technical and engineering aspects are given in an adjoining paper.