As the number of medical web sites in various languages increases, it is more than necessary to establish specific criteria and control measures that give the consumers some guarantee that the health web sites they are visiting, meet a minimum level of quality standards and that the professionals offering the information on the web site are responsible for its contents and activities.
Based upon state-of-the-art technology in the areas of web crawling and spidering, multilingual information extraction, semantic resources and quality labelling, MedIEQ paves the way towards the automation of quality labelling process in medical web sites. MedIEQ delivers tools that crawl the Web to locate medical web sites in seven different European languages (Spanish, Catalan, German, English, Greek, Czech, and Finnish) in order to verify their content using a set of machine readable quality criteria. MedIEQ tools monitor already labelled medical sites alerting labelling experts in case the sites’ content is updated against the quality criteria, thus facilitating the work of medical quality labelling agencies.
The overall objective of MedIEQ is to advance current medical quality labelling technology, drawing on past and original research in the area. The implementation of this objective is based on the realisation of the following more specific objectives:
-
Develop a scheme for the quality labelling of medical web content and provide the tools supporting the creation, maintenance and access of labelling data according to this scheme;
-
Specify a methodology for the content analysis of medical web sites according to the MedIEQ scheme and develop the tools that will implement it;
-
Specify a methodology and develop the tools for the creation and maintenance of the multilingual resources that will support content analysis in medical web sites;
-
Integrate the above technologies into a prototype labelling system implemented using an open architecture.
-
Demonstrate the resulting prototype in 7 different languages and two labelling applications (third party accreditation, classification).