Designing and implementing medical web portals: spreading educational and research materials on the Internet.
OBJECTIVE
To design and implement a medical web portal providing access to well qualified and high-quality information in the framework of universities and hospitals.


METHODS
Based on the authors  experience and the published literature, a model is proposed which describes the properties of documents in an object-oriented way. This model clearly separates from usual properties: the subject of a document as keywords, and information concerning its type, format, and location.


RESULTS
An implementation has been done with an existing software that allows the capability to organize and index a web site according to the model. Experiments have been conducted which demonstrate the feasibility and the utility of such an approach.


CONCLUSIONS
The benefits for the users, both designers and end users, of using such a portal are discussed. Forthcoming works are described.
Joubert
M
M
LERTIM, Faculté de Medecine, Université de la Méditerranée, Marseille, France.
Aymard
S
S
Staccini
P
P
Fieschi
M
M
D004501:Education, Medical; D006266:Health Education; D007255:Information Services / Q000458:organization & administration*; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet / Q000458:organization & administration*; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled