After a critical review of the present architecture of SNOMED CT, addressing both logical and ontological issues, we present a roadmap towards an overall improvement of this terminology. In particular, we recommend the following actions: Upper level categories should be rearranged according to a standard upper level ontology. Meta-class like concepts should be identified and removed from the taxonomy. SNOMED concepts denoting (non instantiable) individual entities (e.g. geographical regions)

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... uld be kept separate from those concepts that denote (instantiable) types. SNOMED binary relations should be reduced to a set of canonical ones, following existing recommendations. Taxonomies should be cleansed and split into disjoint partitions. The number of full definitions should be increased. Finally, we propose a new approach to modeling part-whole hierarchies, as well as the integration of qualifier relations into the description logic framework.