Terminology Services Course Guide

3.2. Snowstorm

Participants in the SNOMED CT Terminology Services Certification Course will have the opportunity to practice their skills using a publicly accessible instance of Snowstorm, provided and hosted by SNOMED International. Snowstorm is the SNOMED CT terminology server developed by SNOMED International. It is built on top of Elasticsearch, with a focus on performance and enterprise scalability. Snowstorm is used by the SNOMED International Browser and Authoring Platform to query the SNOMED CT International Edition and several Extensions. For further information about Snowstorm, please refer to https://github.com/IHTSDO/snowstorm.

Application Programming Interfaces

Snowstorm provides two Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which will be used through this course - the (native) ❄️ Snowstorm API and the  FHIR API.

1. ❄️ Snowstorm API

When accessing the terminology server via the native Snowstorm API, please use the following base URL:
                https://snowstorm-training.snomedtools.org/snowstorm/snomed-ct/

For example, the following URL will retrieve all branches in the terminology server:
                https://snowstorm-training.snomedtools.org/snowstorm/snomed-ct/branches

Please note that the Snowstorm API uses Swagger to provide some additional functionality such as a web-based API client and documentation.

2.  Snowstorm FHIR API

When accessing the terminology server via the FHIR API, please use the following base URL:
                https://snowstorm-training.snomedtools.org/fhir/

For example, the following URL will discover the capabilities of the Snowstorm terminology server:
                https://snowstorm-training.snomedtools.org/fhir/metadata

Unfortunately, the FHIR API does not easily support a Swagger interface. However, a Postman project is provided to try out the FHIR API calls.

Terms of Usage

Participants agree to use the SNOMED CT content accessed using the Snowstorm Terminology Server for only their personal education purposes, and for only the duration of their enrolment in a SNOMED International course or certification exam. Any use of SNOMED CT for any other purpose requires a license. For more information on obtaining a SNOMED CT license please refer to http://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/get-snomed-ct. Please note that where a participant does not abide by the Snowstorm Terms of Usage, the participant will be immediately withdrawn from the course and will forfeit all fees paid.