Getting Started

Welcome to Snow Owl! This document will guide you through the most important features of the software. Follow Snow Owl on Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with new features and releases. Check out our Youtube channel for useful tutorial videos and visit our SlideShare page for presentations on Snow Owl. If you need help, please contact us at [e-mail].

Have fun!

What is Snow Owl?

Snow Owl is an authoring platform for clinical terminologies. Amongst its many useful features, you will find the support of Expression Constraint Language (ECL) for semantic querying, the ability to create intensional and extensional subsets among other reference set types that follow the SNOMED International (formerly known as IHTSDO) SNOMED CT RF2 specifications, as well as collaborative authoring. In addition to authoring SNOMED CT or a national extension, Snow Owl supports a variety of other ontologies and classifications. Snow Owl is designed to be a framework to support higher-level terminology authoring tools, such as drug and device dictionaries.

Snow Owl is built upon the Eclipse platform, which ensures easy integration of Eclipse-based application architectures within a single tool. An example of this integration is Stanford's Protégé Ontology Editor, which allows us to use any Protégé-compatible description logic classifier. Snow Owl also seamlessly integrates with information model toolings, such as the HL7 Static Model Designer and our Logical Information Model tooling to support domain model design, ontology authoring, and the binding between the two. Snow Owl can operate in two modes; in stand-alone mode supporting a single user or in collaborative mode with multiple users connected to a single server authoring the same terminology simultaneously in a distributed fashion.