SNOMED CT can be characterized as a multilingual thesaurus with an ontological foundation.
Thesaurus-like features are concept–term relations such as the synonymous descriptions "Acute coryza", "Acute nasal catarrh", "Acute rhinitis", "Common cold" (as well as Spanish "resfrío común" and "rinitis infecciosa") for the concept 82272006.

Under ontological scrutiny, SNOMED-CT is a class hierarchy (with extensive overlap of classes in contrast to typical statistical classifications like ICD).

This means that the SNOMED CT concept 82272006 defines the class of all the individual disease instances that match the criteria for "common cold" (e.g., one patient may have "head cold" noted in their record, and another may have "Acute coryza"; both can be found as instances of "common cold").

The superclass (Is-A) Relation relates classes in terms of inclusion of their members.
That is, all individual "cold-processes" are also included in all superclasses of the class Common Cold, such as Viral upper respiratory tract infection (Figure).

SNOMED CT's relational statements are basically triplets of the form Concept₁ – Relationₓ – Concept₂, with Relationₓ being from a small number of relation types (called linkage concepts), e.g. finding site, due to, etc.
The interpretation of these triplets is (implicitly) based on the semantics of a simple Description logic (DL).
E.g., the triplet Common Cold – causative agent – Virus, corresponds to the first-order expression

forall x:  instance-of (x, Common cold) ->  exists y: instance-of (y, Virus) and causative-agent (y, x)
or the more intuitive DL expression
Common cold subClassOf causative-agent some Virus
In the Common cold example the concept description is "primitive", which means that necessary criteria are given that must be met for each instance, without being sufficient for classifying a disorder as an instance of Common Cold .
In contrast, the example Viral upper respiratory tract infection depicts a fully described concept, which is represented in description logic as follows:
 Viral upper respiratory tract infection equivalentTo
 	Upper respiratory infection and Viral respiratory infection and
 		Causative-agent some Virus and
 		Finding-site some Upper respiratory tract structure and
 		Pathological-process some Infectious process
This means that each and every individual disorder for which all definitional criteria are met can be classified as an instance of Viral upper respiratory tract infection.
SNOMED CT can be characterized as a multilingual thesaurus with an ontological foundation. Thesaurus-like features are concept–term relations such as the synonymous descriptions "Acute coryza", "Acute nasal catarrh", "Acute rhinitis", "Common cold" (as well as Spanish "resfrío común" and "rinitis infecciosa") for the concept 82272006.
Under ontological scrutiny, SNOMED-CT is a class hierarchy (with extensive overlap of classes in contrast to typical statistical classifications like ICD).
This means that the SNOMED CT concept 82272006 defines the class of all the individual disease instances that match the criteria for "common cold" (e.g., one patient may have "head cold" noted in their record, and another may have "Acute coryza"; both can be found as instances of "common cold").
The superclass (Is-A) Relation relates classes in terms of inclusion of their members. That is, all individual "cold-processes" are also included in all superclasses of the class Common Cold, such as Viral upper respiratory tract infection (Figure).
SNOMED CT's relational statements are basically triplets of the form Concept₁ – Relationₓ – Concept₂, with Relationₓ being from a small number of relation types (called linkage concepts), e.g. finding site, due to, etc. The interpretation of these triplets is (implicitly) based on the semantics of a simple Description logic (DL). E.g., the triplet Common Cold – causative agent – Virus, corresponds to the first-order expression

forall x:  instance-of (x, Common cold) ->  exists y: instance-of (y, Virus) and causative-agent (y, x)
or the more intuitive DL expression
Common cold subClassOf causative-agent some Virus
In the Common cold example the concept description is "primitive", which means that necessary criteria are given that must be met for each instance, without being sufficient for classifying a disorder as an instance of Common Cold . In contrast, the example Viral upper respiratory tract infection depicts a fully described concept, which is represented in description logic as follows:
 Viral upper respiratory tract infection equivalentTo
 	Upper respiratory infection and Viral respiratory infection and
 		Causative-agent some Virus and
 		Finding-site some Upper respiratory tract structure and
 		Pathological-process some Infectious process
This means that each and every individual disorder for which all definitional criteria are met can be classified as an instance of Viral upper respiratory tract infection.
SNOMED CT