`sct` CHANGELOG and release announcements

sct
1

Hi Open Health Hubbers,

sct has moved quite quickly since I first posted about it, so I am starting this topic as a plain-English changelog. I will add a reply here whenever a new release has something useful to say, concentrating on what people can now do rather than the internal plumbing.

The current release is v0.19.0. This is a snapshot of what sct can do today.

What sct can do now

  • Start with a raw SNOMED CT RF2 release, including a .zip straight from NHS TRUD, and turn it into something much easier to work with locally.
  • Produce a single readable NDJSON data file, a searchable SQLite database, Parquet for data analysis, or a folder of Markdown files. These are all local files that you control and can regenerate at any time.
  • Find concepts quickly by code, term or synonym, with exact search, typo-tolerant search, search-as-you-type and optional meaning-based search.
  • Browse concept hierarchies and relationships, run ECL queries, draw diagrams and compare two SNOMED CT releases to see what changed.
  • Work with reference sets, historical replacements and mappings between SNOMED CT, CTV3, Read v2, ICD-10 and OPCS-4.
  • Build and validate clinical code lists as ordinary text files that can live in Git, while still importing and exporting common formats.
  • Explore SNOMED CT through a terminal interface or local web interface instead of having to learn every command first.
  • Run a local FHIR R4 terminology server, either directly or with Docker.
  • Give AI assistants such as Claude and Cursor safe, local access to terminology lookup and search through MCP.
  • Use the same terminology engine from Rust applications through the new Rust SDK.
  • Install prebuilt releases on Linux, macOS and Windows, including Homebrew, Scoop, AUR, Cargo and the shell installers.

The important bit is that the terminology stays on your machine. There is no Java or Elasticsearch requirement, and ordinary use does not depend on a remote terminology server. sct does not bundle SNOMED CT content itself, so you still need access to an appropriately licensed release.

Questions, bug reports, ideas and examples of how you are using it are all very welcome in this category.