The main purpose of this European Standard is to support the safe transfer of the majority of hierarchical healthcare classification systems between organisations and dissimilar software products. It is intended to serve as the core representation, from which all publication forms can be derived. The Standard shall therefore be in depth enough to uniquely identify and describe the structure and the relevant elements in those systems. This Standard does not intend to prescribe the meaning of structuring elements in classification systems. This Standard is not meant to be a direct format for printing or viewing the contents of a classification system. Views and prints shall be derived from this representation by post processing.
1.2 Target groups of this European Standard
This European Standard is applicable to:
a) developers of first and second generation [2] classification systems and terminologies, to assist in the construction, maintenance and publication (both in paper and electronic formats) of a particular system;
b) developers of information systems to assist in the inclusion of mechanisms for unambiguous loading of classification systems in their applications;
c) organisations responsible for updating classification systems;
d) institutions receiving updated classification systems.
1.3 Topics considered outside the scope of this European Standard
This European Standard is not intended to:
a) provide a normative syntax on how a classification system shall be constructed;
b) define link types between elements in a classification system; this is left to the developers of classification systems;
c) provide a representation for direct viewing or printing.