The purpose of ISO 18104:2003 is to establish a nursing reference terminology model consistent with the goals and objectives of other specific health terminology models in order to provide a more unified reference health model. This International Standard includes the development of reference terminology models for nursing diagnoses and nursing actions and relevant terminology and definitions for its implementation.

The potential uses for this reference terminology model are to

1. support the intensional definition of nursing diagnosis and nursing action concepts reflective of a broad range of roles and practice settings,
2. facilitate the representation of nursing diagnosis and nursing action concepts and their relationships in a manner suitable for computer processing,
3. provide a framework for the generation of compositional expressions from atomic concepts within a reference terminology,
4. facilitate the construction of nursing terminologies in a regular form which will make mapping among them easier,
5. facilitate the mapping among nursing diagnosis and nursing action concepts from various terminologies including those developed as interface terminologies and statistical classifications,
6. enable the systematic evaluation of terminologies and associated terminology models for purposes of harmonization, and
7. provide a language to describe the structure of nursing diagnosis and nursing action concepts in order to enable appropriate integration with other reference terminology models and with information models.