Enhancing the MeSH thesaurus to retrieve French online health resources in a quality-controlled gateway.
The amount of health information available on the Internet is considerable. In this context, several health gateways have been developed. Among them, CISMeF (Catalogue and Index of Health Resources in French) was designed to catalogue and index health resources in French. The goal of this article is to describe the various enhancements to the MeSH thesaurus developed by the CISMeF team to adapt this terminology to the broader field of health Internet resources instead of scientific articles for the medline bibliographic database. CISMeF uses two standard tools for organizing information: the MeSH thesaurus and several metadata element sets, in particular the Dublin Core metadata format. The heterogeneity of Internet health resources led the CISMeF team to enhance the MeSH thesaurus with the introduction of two new concepts, respectively, resource types and metaterms. CISMeF resource types are a generalization of the publication types of medline. A resource type describes the nature of the resource and MeSH keyword/qualifier pairs describe the subject of the resource. A metaterm is generally a medical specialty or a biological science, which has semantic links with one or more MeSH keywords, qualifiers and resource types. The CISMeF terminology is exploited for several tasks: resource indexing performed manually, resource categorization performed automatically, visualization and navigation through the concept hierarchies and information retrieval using the Doc'CISMeF search engine. The CISMeF health gateway uses several MeSH thesaurus enhancements to optimize information retrieval, hierarchy navigation and automatic indexing.
Douyère
Magaly
M
CISMeF, Rouen University Hospital, Medical School, University of Rouen, Rouen, France.
Soualmia
Lina F
LF
Névéol
Aurélie
A
Rogozan
Alexandrina
A
Dahamna
Badisse
B
Leroy
Jean-Philippe
JP
Thirion
Benoît
B
Darmoni
Stefan J
SJ
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D005602:France; D006295:Health Resources; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D007802:Language; D016239:MEDLINE; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D009862:Online Systems; D011786:Quality Control; D012660:Semantics; D009626:Terminology as Topic