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Topics of Interest

In the description of medical web resources by labeling authorities, two main approaches exist, namely:

  • Filtering Portals: the web resources are classified according to predetermined criteria and organized in groups in order to facilitate easy access. Examples of this mechanism include: “Agency for Quality in Medicine” (AQUMED), “Catalog and Index of French-speaking Medical Sites” (CISMEF), “Organising Medical Networked Information - The UK Gateway to reliable health information” (OMNI), etc.
  • Third-party Accreditation: an organization evaluates actively the content of a website according to a set of criteria. Compliance with those criteria is showed with a logo or trust mark on the homepage. Examples of such seals include: Web Mèdica Acreditada (WMA), URAC Accreditation Program, etc.

These approaches can also be combined, as in the cases of HON Code of the Health on the Net Foundation, and WMA. There are also approaches focusing on the searching/retrieval functionalities of relevant medical information, like web sites using Google Co-op, e.g. MedicineNet.com.

A major issue in all the above mentioned approaches is the need for a continuous review and control of the classified or accredited web content for thousands of web sites that means a huge amount of human effort. On the other hand, end-users’ description of health-related web resources with opinions and comments, has the potential to provide a useful additional source of information to both end-users and labeling authorities.

Based upon these observations, the workshop will address the following:

  • Knowledge representation and management technologies (e.g. OWL, RDF, Annotation Schemas, etc.) that enable the creation of machine-processable descriptions of medical web resources, either by experts of simple users.
  • Challenges related to content collection and information extraction techniques that allow the retrieval of unclassified/unlabeled web resources or the continuous monitoring of already classified/labeled ones.
  • Applications of Medical Web Content Accreditation, utilizing Semantic Web technologies/tools.