Definition Status

Definition status is either primitive or sufficiently defined. The latter is a refinement of the previous terminology which talked about being fully defined.

In the presence of GCIs, fully defined is an imprecise characterisation and all relevant documentation (e.g., 4.5. Primitive and fully-defined Concepts) needs to be updated.

A concept is sufficiently defined if:

1. It occurs as the ClassExpression at the top level* of an EquivalentClasses expression, or

2. It occurs as the superClassExpression in a Subclass Axiom, and the corresponding subClassExpression is non-trivial (i.e., not an atomic class or a compound expression that reduces to an atomic class, such as an intersection containing only a single atomic class)

Case 2 corresponds to sufficient but not necessary conditions, and it is expected that definitions of this form will not be used in SNOMED CT.

 

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[*]  It is assumed that an atomic class is never trivially nested inside a singleton intersection or union.