Standards to support the ongoing development and maintenance of nursing terminologies

Introduction Version 1.0 of the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP®) was released by the International Council of Nurses in 2005, building on previous versions (i.e. α, β and β2). ICNP® is described as “a unified nursing language system. It is a compositional terminology for nursing practice that facilitates the development of and the cross-mapping among local terms and existing terminologies” (International Council of Nurses 2007a). In contrast to previous versions, ICNP® Version 1.0 has been developed using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) (World Wide Web Consortium 2004) within the Protégé ontology development environment (Stanford Medical Informatics 2006). As such ICNP® might be considered a formal terminological system (rather than for example a statistical classification).