Introduction

Snow Owl® is a highly scalable, open source terminology server with revision-control capabilities and collaborative authoring platform features. It allows you to store, search and author high volumes of terminology artifacts quickly and efficiently.

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Introduction

Features include:

  • Revision-controlled authoring

    • Maintains multiple versions (including unpublished and published) for each terminology artifact and provides APIs to access them all

    • Independent work branches offer work-in-process isolation, external business workflow integration and team collaboration

  • SNOMED CT and others

    • Full SNOMED CT terminology support (full RF2 support, ECL v1.3, Reference Sets, OWL 2 EL/DL support, experimental Query Language)

    • With its modular design, the server can maintain multiple terminologies (including local codes, mapping sets, value sets)

  • Various set of APIs

    • SNOMED CT API (RESTful and native JAVA API)

    • FHIR API

    • CIS API

  • Highly extensible and configurable

    • Simple to use plug-in system makes it easy to develop and add new terminology tooling/API or any other functionality

  • Built on top of Elasticsearch (highly scalable, distributed, open source search engine)

    • Connect to your existing cluster or use the embedded instance

    • All the power of Elasticsearch is available (full-text search support, monitoring, analytics and many more)

Download

This distribution only includes features licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. To get access to the full set of features, please contact B2i Healthcare.

View the detailed release notes here.

Not the version you're looking for? View past releases.

Install and Run

NOTE: You need to have a recent version of Java installed (Java 11+, https://jdk.java.net/archive/).

Once you have downloaded the appropriate package:

Learn Snow Owl

Building from source

Snow Owl uses Maven for its build system. In order to create a distribution, simply run the following command in the cloned directory.

mvn clean package

The distribution packages can be found in the releng/com.b2international.snowowl.server.update/target folder, when the build is complete.

To run the test cases, use the following command:

mvn clean verify

Development

These instructions will get Snow Owl up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

Snow Owl is an Equinox-OSGi based server. To develop plug-ins for Snow Owl you need to use Eclipse as IDE:

Required Eclipse plug-ins (install the listed features via Help -> Install New Software...):

Note: you may have to untick the Show only the latest versions of the available software checkbox to get older versions of a feature. Please use the exact version specified below, not the latest point release.

Eclipse Preferences

Make sure you have the following preferences enabled/disabled.

  • Plug-in development API baseline errors is set to Ignored (Preferences > Plug-in Development > API Baselines)

  • The Plugin execution not covered by lifecycle configuration: org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-clean-plugin:2.5:clean type of errors can be ignored or changed to Warnings in Preferences->Maven->Errors/Warnings.

  • Set the workspace encoding to UTF-8 (Preferences->General->Workspace)

  • Set the line endings to Unix style (Preferences->General->Workspace)

Git configuration

  • Make sure the Git line endings are set to input (Preferences->Team->Git->Configuration - add key if missing core.autocrlf = input)

First steps

  1. Import all projects into your Eclipse workspace and wait for the build to complete

  2. Select all projects and hit Alt + F5 and trigger an update to all Maven projects manually (to download dependencies from Maven)

  3. Open the target-platform/target-platform-local.target file

  4. Wait until Eclipse resolves the target platform (click on the Resolve button if it refuses to do so) and then click on Set as Active Target platform

  5. Wait until the build is complete and you have no compile errors

  6. Launch snow-owl-oss launch configuration in the Run Configurations menu

  7. Navigate to http://localhost:8080/snowowl/snomed-ct/v3

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Versioning

Our releases use semantic versioning. You can find a chronologically ordered list of notable changes in CHANGELOG.md.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. See LICENSE for details and refer to NOTICE for additional licensing notes and uses of third-party components.

Acknowledgements

In March 2015, SNOMED International generously licensed the Snow Owl Terminology Server components supporting SNOMED CT. They subsequently made the licensed code available to their members and the global community under an open-source license.

In March 2017, NHS Digital licensed the Snow Owl Terminology Server to support the mandatory adoption of SNOMED CT throughout all care settings in the United Kingdom by April 2020. In addition to driving the UK’s clinical terminology efforts by providing a platform to author national clinical codes, Snow Owl will support the maintenance and improvement of the dm+d drug extension which alone is used in over 156 million electronic prescriptions per month. Improvements to the terminology server made under this agreement will be made available to the global community.

Many other organizations have directly and indirectly contributed to Snow Owl, including: Singapore Ministry of Health; American Dental Association; University of Nebraska Medical Center (USA); Federal Public Service of Public Health (Belgium); Danish Health Data Authority; Health and Welfare Information Systems Centre (Estonia); Department of Health (Ireland); New Zealand Ministry of Health; Norwegian Directorate of eHealth; Integrated Health Information Systems (Singapore); National Board of Health and Welfare (Sweden); eHealth Suisse (Switzerland); and the National Library of Medicine (USA).

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