Building and Using Terminology Services for the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

This paper describes the process of building terminology service and using domain ontology as its conceptual backbone for a European Union agency. ECDC, established in 2005, aims at strengthening Europe's defences against infectious diseases, operates a range of information services at the crossroads of different professional domains as e.g. infectious diseases, EU regulation in public health, etc. A domain ontology based vocabulary service and a tool to disseminate its content (a terminology server) was designed and implemented to ensure semantic interoperability among different information system components. Design considerations, standard selection (SKOS, OWL) choosing external references (MeSH, ICD10, SNOMED) and the services offered on the human and machine user interface are presented and lessons learned are explained.