About this site
What contsys.org is, how its addresses work, and the different ways — for people and for software — of getting at the model.
This site presents a model of how health and social care work — who does what, for whom, when, and on whose authority — conformant to ISO 13940:2026, the international standard for a system of concepts to support continuity of care. It presents the model, not the text of the standard: the standard itself is published by ISO.
It began as a straightforward publication of the model and has grown into something more like an application. This page explains the parts that are not obvious from browsing.
Every concept has a permanent address
Each of the 172 concepts lives at an address of the form
contsys.org/concept/{name} — the concept's name in lower case, with
spaces written as underscores and any real hyphen kept:
care plan is at /concept/care_plan,
self-care at /concept/self-care. These addresses are
the concept's identity here, and they are maintained: cite them, link to them, and build
on them.
Addresses from the 2015 edition of the standard keep working. A concept that was
renamed redirects to its successor — the old
/concept/clinical_process arrives at
continuity of care process, because that is where the idea went. A
concept the 2026 edition retired resolves to a page saying so, naming the concept you
asked for, rather than pretending nothing was ever there.
Walk it through
The same model can be explored on foot. The White Rose General Hospital, at
/hospital/,
is a fictional hospital laid out from the model itself:
every concept is a place, every association a doorway between places. The
Walk it through link on each concept page takes you to that concept's part of the
building; /hospital/?concept=care_plan does the same by
address.
The hospital's Postgraduate Medical Centre holds a lecture theatre built for
presenting the model. Its projection screen can show slides, or the live pages of this
site — press C at the theatre to switch, use the arrow keys or a presenter's
clicker to page through a concept's text, and press Esc to free the mouse and
read the page directly. Arriving by
/hospital/?start=theatre&screen=care_plan
puts you in the seats
with that concept already on the screen.
For software as well as people
Every concept page names its machine-readable forms, and they sit beside it: add
.ttl (Turtle), .rdf (RDF/XML) or
.jsonld (JSON-LD) to any concept address —
/concept/care_plan.ttl — and you get a description of just that concept
under its published identifier, including its definition and the relationships it takes
part in.
The vocabulary is also available whole: /contsys.ttl is the current
model as SKOS, and /rdf still serves the 2015 edition's vocabulary,
byte for byte as it was published, for anyone who built against it.
/concept-index.json is a single small file carrying every concept's
name, address, definition and former names — enough to build a search over the model
from one fetch.
Any page here can be embedded in another site or a presentation by adding
?embed=1 to its address: the menus and navigation disappear, the type
grows, and the page becomes just the concept. The lecture theatre uses exactly this.
Where it all comes from
Everything generated on this site — the concept pages, the diagrams, the machine-readable files, the redirect table — is produced from one master UML model, so the pictures, the prose and the data cannot drift apart. The diagrams on each concept page are clickable: every class box is a link to that concept's page.
Licensing and attribution are in the footer of every page. In short: the content is Oughtibridge Ltd under the Apache License 2.0, the concept-area overview and master diagrams are NHS England under the Open Government Licence v3.0, and ISO 13940:2026 itself is published by ISO.