1.1 This specification covers the documentation of the principal notions necessary and sufficient to assign value to a controlled health vocabulary. This specification will serve as a guide for governments, funding agencies, terminology developers, terminology integration organizations, and the purchasers and users of controlled health terminology systems working toward improved terminological development and recognition of value in a controlled health vocabulary. It is applicable to all areas of health care about which information is kept or utilized. It is intended to complement and utilize those notions already identified by other national and international standards bodies.

1.2 This specification will provide vocabulary developers and authors with the guidelines needed to construct useful, maintainable controlled health vocabularies. These tenets do not attempt to specify all of the richness that can be incorporated into a health terminology. However this specification does specify the minimal requirements, which, if not adhered to, will ensure that the vocabulary will have limited generalizability and will be very difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. This specification will provide terminology developers with a sturdy starting point for the development of controlled health vocabularies. This foundation serves as the basis from which vocabulary developers will build robust, large-scale, reliable and maintainable terminologies.

1.3 This specification explicitly does not refer to classifications or coding systems (for example, a simple list of pairs of rubrics and codes) that are not designed to be used clinically.