A search tool based on 'encapsulated' MeSH thesaurus to retrieve quality health resources on the Internet

Abstract

In the year 2001, the Internet has become a major source of health information for the health professional and the Netizen. The objective of Doc' CISMeF (D'C) was to create a powerful generic search tool based on a structured information model which 'encapsulates' the MeSH thesaurus to index and retrieve quality health resources on the Internet. To index resources, D'C uses four sections in its information model: 'meta-term', keyword, subheading, and resource type. Two search options are available: simple and advanced. The simple search requires the end-user to input a single term or expression. If this term belongs to the D'C information structure model, it will be exploded. If not, a full-text search is performed. In the advanced search, complex searches are possible combining Boolean operators with meta-terms, keywords, subheadings and resource types. D'C uses two standard tools for organising information: the MeSH thesaurus and the Dublin Core metadata format. Resources included in D'C are described according to the following elements: title, author or creator, subject and keywords, description, publishers, date, resource type, format, identifier, and language.

Building a Semantic Health Data Warehouse in the Context of Clinical Trials: Development and Usability Study

“…The 11.9 million clinical documents in French of RUH consequently play a strategic role in the context of the SHDW. Since its creation in 1995, our research team has strongly investigated French IR research domains through T&Os (and more broadly knowledge organization systems or KOSs), which has led to the development of several search tools mostly dedicated to IR from documentary and bibliographical resources [22,35]. However, the complexity of the clinical data and, more broadly, of SHDWs as a whole required the pooling of several of these acquired skills and tools.…”

“…Clinical information originating from HDWs inherits from a complex data structure. This data structure is very different from documentary and bibliographic IR context, which has been studied in the last 2 decades [22,35] and involves a limited number of entities and relationships and where data are classically more flatly structured with a limited depth (basically, a resource entity possibly surrounded with several other entities, such as an author or an editor entity). We believe that this entity-oriented vision of the SHDW gives added value to the IR systems dedicated to HDW, compared with existing solutions, such as i2b2, which usually adopt a patient-centered vision and provide the user with aggregated data and lists of patients as a result.…”