SNOMED CT® Release Format 1 (RF1) Guide - ihtsdo

Figure 1: Multiple levels of granularity
2.1.1.2. Descriptions
A Description associates a human-readable term with a Concept that it describes.
A Concept is associated with several Descriptions. Each of these represents either a Preferred Term, Synonym,
or Fully Specified Name for the Concept in a particular language or dialect.
A Description may be a Preferred Term in one dialect and a synonym in another dialect. This is indicated by
references to the Description from an appropriate Language Subset.
Each Description is identified by a unique DescriptionId and is distributed as a row in the Descriptions Table.
2.1.1.2.1. Fully Specified Name
Structure and Content Guide | 13
Each concept has one Fully Specified Name (FSN) intended to provide an unambiguous way to name a
concept. The purpose of the FSN is to uniquely describe a concept and clarify its meaning. The FSN is not
a commonly used term or natural phrase and would not be expected to appear in the human-readable
representation of a clinical record.
Note: The term in each FSN is unique across the entire active content of a SNOMED CT release.
Each FSN term ends with a “semantic tag” in parentheses.The semantic tag indicates the semantic category
to which the concept belongs (e.g. clinical finding, disorder, procedure, organism, person, etc.).The “semantic
tag” helps to disambiguate the different concept which may be referred to by the same commonly used word
or phrase.
Example: | Hematoma (morphologic abnormality) | is the FSN of the concept that represents the
“hematoma” that a pathologist sees at the tissue level. In contrast, | Hematoma (disorder) | is the FSN
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