Welcome to the new online home of the Open Concept Lab community! During 2020, we were busy completely overhauling the OCL’s open source tools and we are excited to finally make them available to you.
What’s new?
OCL Community Site
OCL’s main website (at openconceptlab.org) is now built on WordPress and will grow over time as the go-to resource for the OCL community. It includes our new blog–which you’re viewing now–and all technical documentation has been consolidated into a single location at docs.openconceptlab.org.
OCL Open-Source Toolkit
OCL’s tools have been rebuilt from scratch and are, as always, open source and built for scale.
- OCL Terminology Service: At the core of OCL is a RESTful terminology service, which we rebuilt from scratch to be high performance and scalable. On a future post, we will cover the upgraded service in detail.
- OCL TermBrowser: OCL’s new web interface is called the OCL TermBrowser. It is packed with new features, including more intuitive search and lightweight content authoring. The TermBrowser can connect to multiple OCL or SVCM-compatible servers at the same time.
- OpenMRS Dictionary Manager: The OpenMRS Dictionary Manager client focuses on the workflow of an OpenMRS implementer who is managing a concept dictionary using OCL, drawing on concepts & mappings from CIEL, and synchronizing with one or more OpenMRS servers.
OCL Online
While OCL’s open-source tools are all available to download and install on your own infrastructure, OCL Online is where you can use OCL in the cloud along with the global community and pre-loaded with key terminologies. Find out more at openconceptlab.org.
What’s next?
We are launching several other exciting features later in 2021. Stay tuned for updates on support for FHIR® v4.0.1, a bulk importing user interface, and much more.
Getting Involved
In addition to supporting an open-source toolkit, OCL is also a community. The OCL Community is a network of people with a shared interest in strengthening the use of standard terminologies and metadata to improve health system performance. There are many ways to participate in this community and here are a few ways to get started:
- Create an account to join our mailing list
- Join our community meetings: Weekly OCL Architecture Call, Weekly OCL Developer Call, and Monthly OpenHIE Terminology Service Call
- Using and sharing the tools: We are always looking to bring more skills, knowledge, and perspectives into our community and we hope you’ll help us achieve this by sharing our new website, our tools, and the different ways to get involved!
We are thrilled to launch our newly renovated toolkit and website. We spent time developing these to be more useful and to contribute to our mission of providing a platform and encode best practices that support the deployment and implementation of health terminology.
To see these in action, we invite you to join our mailing list and to come to our showcase event: Details to be posted soon!