Health Informatics Journal Special Issue

Fourth Call for Papers on

Semantic Descriptions of Medical Web Resources: Technologies to

support their Creation, Maintenance and Access

A Special Issue of the

Health Informatics Journal

Guest Editors

V. Karkaletsis,

Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications,

National Center for Scientific Research (NCSR) “Demokritos”, Greece

P. Karampiperis,

Software & Knowledge Engineering Lab, Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications,

National Center for Scientific Research (NCSR) “Demokritos”, Greece

M.A. Mayer,

Web Médica Acreditada, Medical Association of Barcelona (COMB), Spain

Description

The increasing amount of freely available health-related web content generates, on the one hand, excellent conditions for self-education of patients as well as physicians, but on the other hand entails substantial risks if such information is trusted irrespective of low competence or even bad intentions of its authors.

Patients continue to find new ways of reaching health information on the web and more than four out of ten health information seekers say the material they find affects their decisions about their health. However, it is difficult for health information consumers, such as the patients and the general public, to assess by themselves the quality of the information because they are not always familiar with the medical domains and vocabularies.

This is why medical web resources accreditation by renowned authorities is of high importance. However, various health web content surveys show that the proportion of accredited web resources is insufficient because of the difficulty labeling authorities face in coping with the amount and dynamics of the medical web. The content of medical web resources is very variable and difficult to assess.

The development of tools to support the process of describing the content of medical web resources with meta-data that facilitate their retrieval, and with content labels by certified labeling authorities, is crucial for the delivery of content of better quality to health information consumers. Moreover, 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.

To this end, the scope of this special issue is to assess the current status and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to the description of medical web resources. This special issue continues the 1st International Workshop on Describing Medical Web Resources - DRMed 2024, held in conjunction with the 21st International Congress of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (MIE 2024), May 27, 2024, Göteborg, Sweden.

Subject Coverage

Topics for the special issue include, but are not limited to:

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 or 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 certification, utilizing Semantic Web technologies/tools.
Tools/technologies facilitating end-users’ description of health-related web resources in social networks.

Notes for Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors is available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines page of SAGE Publications

Important Dates