Vocabulary Updates!

[AndyRae]

Carrot loads the OMOP vocabs from Athena. But these update every 6 months.
In that time, users have mapped their data, so how should we handle updating the vocabularies for a deployed Carrot instance?

1. Freeze in time (users unhappy because Vocabs are now not relevant)
2. Drop existing vocabs, and update (existing mappings will move beneath the user)
3. Handle this work with further development (hard to prioritise and resource)

We are anticipating the next update in March 2026, so far talking to users the following approach is:

1. Notify users that this will be happening
2. Users could take time to generate rules themselves (takes a snapshot)

Additionally, it feels desirable to:

• provide some metadata about a generated rules file (which version of vocabs it contains)
• make it clear to users the current version of vocabs that carrot runs with

Related to:

• Update vocabulary tables carrot-mapper#631
• Vocabulary / mapping versioning carrot-mapper#624
• Mapping Rules Versioning #60