Computable Representations of Prose Rules in SNOMED User's Guide
| Concept1 | Relationship | Concept2 |
| Specimen-procedure | applies-to | specimen |
| Specimen-procedure | is-limited-to | procedure |
| Specimen-substance | applies-to | specimen |
| Specimen-substance | is-limited-to | substance |
| Laterality | is-limited-to | side |
| Laterality | is-limited-to | right |
| Laterality | is-limited-to | left |
| Laterality | is-limited-to | right and left |
| Laterality | is-limited-to | unilateral |
In the table above, we have multiple rows for “Laterality”, one for each permissible value, to preserve the SNOMED relational table structure. The set of permissible values for a given attribute is composed by a straightforward SQL statement, such as:
Select Concept2 from Relationships where Concept1=“Laterality”
And Relationship = “is-limited-to”
A rule table such as the above can control a user interface for annotation of a new concept belonging to a specific class/hierarchy by (a) ensuring that only attributes belonging to the “defined attribute” set are presented to the user, by gathering all the “applies-to” attributes for that concept class; (b) when an attribute is chosen, constraining the selectable (or searchable) values of this attribute from the range of this attribute.
