General Structure of Release Files

The following rules apply to all SNOMED CT Release Files.

• SNOMED CT Release Files are UTF-8 encoded, tab delimited text files.

• Each line, including the final line, ends with a carriage return character (hex 0D) followed by a line feed character (hex 0A).

• The first line of each file, contains the names of each column (also know more generally as a field).

• Field names are represented using lower-camel-case

  • First letter of name is lower case

  • First letter of each words apart from the first word in the name is upper case

  • All other letters are lower case.

  • For example:

    • id

    • term

    • typeId

    • relationshipGroup

    • definitionStatusId

• The name, datatype and usage of the fields in each file are specified in the following sections of this guide

  • File Format Specifications

  • Reference Set Types.