Concept Hub - a public semantic terminology wiki

The main objective of Concept Hub Wiki (www.concepthub.org) is to promote semantic interoperability. The wiki technology facilitates collaboration among subject matter experts globally, creating an open, public forum for defining concepts and sharing the multiple ways they can be represented, their mapping to standard and local terminologies, and how the concepts relate.

Contributions from the user community are key to the organic growth of Concept Hub and how comprehensive the content will become. Initial concepts are loaded into Concept Hub by 3M Health Information Systems, Inc. (3M HIS). Registered users take an active part in editing the content in Concept Hub. There are several ways users can contribute to Concept Hub:

  • Additions: Registered users can add new concepts, representations, relationships, and mappings.
  • Deletions/modifications: Registered users can identify invalid and obsolete concepts. Concepts that have been assigned NCID codes are never deleted. Instead, the status of concepts can be set to be inactive or obsolete.
  • Creating categories: Registered users can create new categories and subcategories within Concept Hub.
  • Creating links: Registered users can create meaningful named relationships among concepts.
  • Suggestions: Users can offer recommendations for enhancements to the Concept Hub wiki.

Concept Hub is designed to facilitate collaboration among consumers and developers of health care terminologies. Its purpose is to establish a permanent public source of well-defined concepts that can be encoded for data exchange between health care systems worldwide. Concept Hub content is seeded by contributions from the 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary (HDD). 3M subject matter experts (SMEs) add appropriate submissions from Concept Hub to the HDD and assign Numeric Concept Identifier (NCID) codes to each unique concept in the HDD’s controlled medical vocabulary.

Operating Principles

  • Adhere to good vocabulary design
  • Maintain transparency in the authoring process
  • Grow Concept Hub through user contributions
  • Make terminology content freely available

Please visit the Concept Hub Wiki as www.concepthub.org.