Terminology Query Language: a server interface for concept-oriented terminology systems

Designers of medical computing applications increasingly require terminology support for their systems. Yet, terminology systems today lack standard methodologies for providing terminology support. This invariably means increased implementation time and expense for system developers who need to use terminologies in their applications. We introduce Terminology Query Language (TQL), a simple query language interface to server implementations of concept-oriented terminologies. TQL is a declarative, set-based query language built on a generic entity-relationship (E/R) schema. TQL defines a common query-based mechanism for accessing terminology information from one or more terminology servers over a network connection.