Profiling ICD-11 Terminological Content Using the Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) Standard

In the beta phase of the 11 revision of International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), the World Health Organization (WHO) exposes ICD-11 content through a collection of web services. The emerging Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) standard provides a common model and semantics for representation, interchange, and federation of terminological resources. We hypothesize that the CTS2 standard can provide service layer of standardization that could potentially aid in the interoperability among authoring applications for the ICD-11 revision. This paper examines the existing WHO ICD-11 content services from the perspective of the CTS2 standard. The content in the WHO ICD-11 content services was mapped to the Code System Catalog, Code System Version Catalog, Entity Description and Association models in the CTS2 specification. It proposes mappings for existing ICD-11 properties and suggests additional CTS2 properties may be important for ICD-11. The mapping effort was used to develop a prototype of the CTS2 Services Wrapper for the ICD-11. In conclusion, the CTS2 standard is useful in exposing ICD-11 content representation through predictable and familiar services. Keywords—ICD-11; CTS2; Medical Classification; Data Standards; Biomedical Ontologies