Syadem

The NUVA Vaccine Ontology Extension to SNOMED CT

EMEA

Collaboration, Implementation, Mapping

In support of SNOMED International's strategy to serve as a Terminology Hub for Integration, SNOMED International has collaborated with Syadem to represent the NUVA Ontology as a SNOMED CT-compatible extension, delivered in RF2 format.

The NUVA Ontology is a dedicated global vocabulary for representing on the long term administered vaccines concepts, gathering data from paper records or any digital format, regardless of when and where the vaccine was administered and how precisely it was recorded. It is intended to act as pivot format across all existing vaccine codifications, informed by a functional description of each vaccine concept through the notion of valences.

Officially launched on May 9 2025 at the International Summit on Vaccine Coding and Standards in Bordeaux, this extension enables transparent semantic interoperability by supporting dual code identifiers. This approach allows NUVA concepts to leverage the advanced querying capabilities of SNOMED CT, including the Expression Constraint Language (ECL), and facilitates the integration of a broad range of internationally available branded vaccines.

This presentation will outline the technical and collaborative work behind the extension, demonstrate its practical applications, and describe planned next steps for deeper integration‚such as aligning vaccine data models, enabling multilingual translations, and mapping to other vaccine code systems.

Description

The scope is a complete representation of the NUVA Ontology as a published SNOMED CT Extension.

Scope

SNOMED CT has significant market penetration and a number of major vendors already support the ingestion of SNOMED CT into their platforms. By aligning with this format and becoming a part of a SNOMED CT installation, NUVA avoids barriers to adoption of implementers having to learn a new file format, semantics and hold a separate CodeSystem in their product.

How SNOMED CT will be used

Although NUVA is a stand alone onology published in its own right, when packaged as an extension to the International Edition of SNOMED CT, the product becomes completely integrated with the International Edition, using SNOMED CT concepts to represent relationships between concepts, both with the NUVA vaccine hierarchy itself, and in its connections to SNOMED CT concepts. The SNOMED CT file format - RF2 - is used to deliver the ontology in a computer friendly format, and SNOMED conventions are used to convey concept terms and properties.