A model for enhancing Internet medical document retrieval with "medical core metadata".
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.


METHODS
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 Force. 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.
Malet
G
G
Oregon Health Sciences University, Portland, USA. gmalet@teleport.com
Munoz
F
F
Appleyard
R
R
Hersh
W
W
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods*; D019146:Hypermedia; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D009317:National Library of Medicine (U.S.); D013358:Subject Headings; D014481:United States