// the find
b2ihealthcare/snow-owl
:owl: Snow Owl Terminology Server - a production-ready, fast, scalable, FHIR Terminology Service compliant server that supports SNOMED CT International and Extensions, LOINC, RxNorm, UMLS, ICD-10/11, custom code systems and many others
Snow Owl is an OSGi-based terminology server built on Elasticsearch. It serves FHIR R4, R4B and R5 terminology operations and supports SNOMED CT authoring, with LOINC and ICD-10 available under license. It is aimed at national programs, health IT teams and anyone running terminology infrastructure, not app developers who want a quick code lookup API. The README says the project has moved to IQVIA's GitHub organization, and this copy is kept for reference.
Revision-controlled authoring is the real differentiator: each artifact keeps multiple versions, and work branches isolate in-progress edits from published content. The SNOMED tooling goes deep, with ECL 2.2, Compositional Grammar and Expression Template Language implementations that live in their own repos and can be used separately. One deployment serves FHIR R4, R4B and R5 side by side, so clients on different spec versions do not need separate servers.
The README says this repo is no longer actively maintained here, so current code, releases and issues live at iqvia-hds-oss/snow-owl. The Apache 2.0 distribution leaves out LOINC, ICD-10 and custom code systems unless you license them from B2i, and those are the content many teams need. Elasticsearch 8 is the only recommended version and Elasticsearch 9 is not supported yet, which will matter for anyone on a current cluster. Development means Eclipse with a list of plug-ins pinned to exact older versions (Groovy, MWE2, Xtext) and a target platform to resolve, which is a heavy setup before a contributor's first build passes.