title: Using knowledge for indexing health web resources in a quality-controlled gateway.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The aim of this study is to provide to indexers MeSH terms to be considered as major ones in a list of terms automatically extracted from a document.
  
  
  METHODS
  We propose a method combining symbolic knowledge - the UMLS Metathesaurus and Semantic Network - and statistical knowledge drawn from co-occurrences of terms in the CISMeF database (a French-language quality-controlled health gateway) using data mining measures. The method was tested on CISMeF corpus of 293 resources.
  
  
  RESULTS
  There was a proportion of 0.37+/-0.26 major terms in the processed records. The method produced lists of terms with a proportion of terms initially pointed out as major of 0.54+/-0.31.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The method we propose reduces the number of terms, which seem not useful for content description of resources, such as "check tags", but retains the most descriptive ones. Discarding these terms is accounted for by: 1) the removal by using semantic knowledge of associations of concepts bearing no real medical significance, 2) the removal by using statistical knowledge of nonstatistically significant associations of terms.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This method can assist effectively indexers in their daily work and will be soon applied in the CISMeF system.
authors.affiliation: LERTIM, Faculte de Medecine, Universite de la Mediterranee, Marseille, France.
authors.forename: Michel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Joubert
authors.forename: Stefan J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Darmoni
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Avillach
authors.forename: Badisse
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Dahamna
authors.forename: Marius
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fieschi
mesh_terms: D016206:Databases, Bibliographic; D005602:France; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D012660:Semantics; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled