title: Labeling and filtering of medical information on the Internet.
abstract: Internet information undergoes no quality controls and virtually anybody can publish anything. Because of this, it is difficult for searchers to take information retrieved from the Internet at face value. A related problem is the uncontrolled promotion of medical products on the Internet. A further problem of today's Internet is that authors use no uniform keywords and other descriptive labels, which deteriorates the quality of search results. A solution for all these problems could be widespread use of descriptive and evaluative metainformation associated with medical Internet information. Our concept is based on a recently established infrastructure for assigning metadata to Internet information, the so-called PICS Standard (Platform for Internet Content Selection). We prototyped a PICS-based rating vocabulary for medical information (med-PICS), containing descriptive and evaluative categories, to be used by the webauthor and third-party label services (such as medical associations), respectively. We propose an international effort to assign metadata to medical Internet information.
authors.affiliation: Dept. of Clinical Social Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Germany.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Eysenbach
authors.forename: T L
authors.initials: TL
authors.lastname: Diepgen
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services / Q000458:organization & administration*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled