A Model for Enhancing Internet Medical Document Retrieval with "Medical Core Metadata"

G. Malet, F. Munoz, R. Appleyard, W. Hersh
1999 JAMIA Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association  
A b s t r a c t Objective: Finding documents on the World Wide Web relevant to a specific medical information need can be difficult. The goal of this work is to define a set of document content description tags, or metadata encodings, that can be used to promote disciplined search access to Internet medical documents. Design: The authors based their approach on a proposed metadata standard, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, which has recently been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task
more » ... orce. Their model also incorporates the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary and MEDLINE-type content descriptions. Results: The model defines a medical core metadata set that can be used to describe the metadata for a wide variety of Internet documents. Conclusions: The authors propose that their medical core metadata set be used to assign metadata to medical documents to facilitate document retrieval by Internet search engines. Ⅲ JAMIA. 1999;6:163 -172. The wealth of resources available on the Internet has stimulated information scientists to consider new models for knowledge retrieval. In theory, the Internet's browsable, searchable, and hyperlinked interface should improve the speed and ease with which users obtain relevant materials. Authors could offer intuitive connections from their documents to remote sites and place their documents in the context of existing literature. Clinical case experiences could be simulated more successfully using the Internet's multimedia features. Despite these inherent advantages, the World Wide Web has established a reputation as a substandard source of health care information that is inadequate to serve the information needs of health care providers. 1,2 A recent study indicates that only 46 percent of surveyed physicians agree that the Internet Affiliation of the authors: is a source of timely, accurate, relevant, and objective content. 3 Use of information resources that are accessible over the Internet for information retrieval in the medical sciences presents a number of challenges. Foremost among these are more reliable navigation tools, search utilities, and filters for content and quality.
doi:10.1136/jamia.1999.0060163 pmid:10094069 pmcid:PMC61355 fatcat:5evnninqvzgt3mw3mcsrfqdnii