A sub-type hierarchy, supported by defining relationships based on description logic, replaced the axes described in this article.
The metaphor used by Roger A. Côté, the first editorial chair, was that SNOMED would become the periodic table of elements of medicine because of its definitional organization beyond the hierarchical design.
Indeed, diseases and procedures were ordered hierarchically and are further referenced back to more elementary terms [citation needed] SNOMED was originally conceived by Côté as an extension of the design of the Systematized Nomenclature of Pathology (SNOP) applicable for all medicine.
In 1998, Kent Spackman was appointed to chair this committee and spearheaded the transformation of the multi-axis systems into a highly computable form (See SNOMED CT): a directed acyclic graph anchored in formal representation logic.
The axes and some examples are provided below: For the Morphology axis, SNOMED has agreed to collaborate and use the same harmonized codes shared with International Classification of Diseases for Oncology.