Introduction
The Canadian Editorial Guidelines apply to requests for new concepts and descriptions, and requests for modification for SNOMED CT. Where Canadian requirements are the same as SNOMED International, the baseline reference is SNOMED International SNOMED CT Editorial Guide. Where more specificity is required, it has been added into this document or included in the domain-specific guides. A French Editorial Guideline titled Guide des règles éditoriales et terminologiques - Développement de contenu SNOMED CT en français is also available to French-speaking stakeholders.
The Canadian Editorial Guidelines outline editorial policies for the SNOMED CT CA Edition. These guidelines are primarily intended to support professionals responsible for editing SNOMED CT content, and for those creating or maintaining extensions in Canada. They also provide stakeholders with editorial criteria for making successful request for change (RFC) submissions for content additions or changes in either the Canadian or the International Edition of SNOMED CT.
The documents in this guide reflect the most current editorial decisions supporting different use cases encountered to date and serve as the baseline to the other domain-specific guidelines. These guidelines are working documents which continue to evolve over time along with the terminology as medicine and health sciences evolve, and as new use cases arise and are accommodated. Stakeholders are encouraged to consult these pages regularly because they are updated and published periodically by the National Standards Release Center (NSRC).
When developing new content, it is important to adhere to the current editorial guidelines to assure consistency and quality. The NSRC has developed several domain-specific guidelines that augment the SNOMED International rules, avoid ambiguity and reflect Canadian requirements. These domain-specific guides include:
General Considerations
These guidelines cover the most common and frequently used rules that apply to terminology content and must be followed when submitting RFCs to the NSRC through the Infoway Request Management System (InfoRMS). However, it is recommended that the Canadian Editorial Guidelines be reviewed first for the following reasons:
- This document explains what the concepts include and what the intent of use is of the different descriptions namely the Fully Specified Name a (FSN) and the Preferred Synonym (PS)
- This document includes a QA Checklist which provides requestors with a summary of the most important criteria to validate prior to submitting your RFC to the NSRC.
Reference to one or more of the above domain-specific guides should be undertaken following review of the general Canadian Editorial Guidelines and QA Checklist.