Improve documentation: how does terminology.hl7.org relate to tx.fhir.org and the hl7-terminology Node package?

[gaurav]

I've been trying to figure out how terminology.hl7.org (which appears to be generated by the code in this repository) relates to https://tx.fhir.org and the hl7-terminology Node package. I have run the ./runonce.sh script from this repo in Java 11 and successfully generated the documentation I see at https://terminology.hl7.org/, including the NPM packages on the download page at https://terminology.hl7.org/downloads.html. However, based on the output from that shell script, this code appears to access both tx.fhir.org ("Connect to Terminology Server at http://tx.fhir.org", "-tx: Connect to http://tx.fhir.org/r4") and possibly hl7-terminology ("Installing hl7.terminology#3.0.0 to the package cache", which I haven’t figured out where that is yet).

I would really appreciate some documentation on:

1. How does this repository use tx.fhir.org? Does it only use terminologies from there, or does it compare the CodeSystems stored locally (e.g. https://github.com/HL7/UTG/blob/master/input/sourceOfTruth/external/v3/codeSystems/cs-v3-snomed-CT.xml) with those stored on tx.fhir.org?
2. Is this the repository that generates the hl7-terminology Node package? If so, does it use tx.fhir.org, the CodeSystems mentioned above, or some other source for the CodeSystem/NamingSystem information?
3. If this is not the repository that generates the hl7-terminology Node package, could you please point me to the documentation on how that package is generated?

The reason I'm poking around with this is because I'd like to propose that FHIR CodeSystems and NamingSystems store the prefixes we need to convert a FHIR Coding (e.g. system: http://hl7.org/fhir/sid/icd-10, code: G44.1) to a concept URL (e.g. http://purl.bioontology.org/ontology/ICD10/G44.1) and vice versa. I'm doing this to solve a problem relating to FHIR RDF generation (see my latest comment on that issue here: w3c/hcls-fhir-rdf#94 (comment)), for which I'd like to be able to modify the hl7.terminology NPM package to add a "prefix" field for a few CodingSystem/NodeSystem entries as an example.

Thanks so much for your help!

[grahamegrieve]

The NPM on packages.fhir.org is the same as the one as produced by this repository and available on the downloads page - it's just picked up through the feed system and cached on packages.fhir.org

The relationship between UTG and tx.fhir.org is circular - tx.fhir.org loads the the most recent published version of UTG when it starts, and provides terminology services based on the UTG content. The UTG build program makes use of the terminology services on tx.fhir.org. That's a bit tricky, and key to that working is that the UTG build program does not make use of tx.fhir.org for anything that's in UTG - it uses the local UTG source preferentially.

The UTG build uses tx.fhir.org for validation and expansion of value sets that use code systems that are not part of UTG like SNOMED, LOINC, RxNorm etc.

I think that you should discuss the kind of changes you want on chat.fhir.org, in the #terminology stream there. And list the code systems for which you wish to propose an RDF namespace. Expect lots of arguments ;-)