A Distributed Terminology Development Environment - PHIN VADS Universal Authoring Framework (UAF)

The exchange of electronic data in a meaningful and timely manner is crucial for public health.   It is important for systems that generate public health data to adopt health information vocabulary in order to achieve semantic interoperability. Managing the collaborative creation of new vocabulary data with strict rules for governance exceeds the abilities of generalized applications and requires specific tools with greater flexibility.
The Universal Authoring Framework (UAF) is a distributed terminology development environment that enables vocabulary specialists to create and update standard vocabularies.  The UAF provides functionality that enables the importing of Standard Development Organization vocabularies to the PHIN VADS terminology server.  Vocabulary updates are bundled into change events, stored as XML, which can be passed to distributed vocabulary servers.   Change Events are processed and published once they have been reviewed and approved through the governance process.   This demonstration will highlight the vocabulary mapping and development process as well as the communication of these vocabularies to distributed environments.