Evaluation of meta-concepts for information retrieval in a quality-controlled health gateway.
BACKGROUND
CISMeF is a French quality-controlled health gateway that uses the MeSH thesaurus. We introduced two new concepts, metaterms (medical specialty which has semantic links with one or more MeSH terms, subheadings and resource types) and resource types.


OBJECTIVE
Evaluate precision and recall of metaterms.


METHODS
We created 16 pairs of queries. Each pair concerned the same topic, but one used metaterms and one MeSH terms. To assess precision, each document retrieved by the query was classified as irrelevant, partly relevant or fully relevant.


RESULTS
The 16 queries yielded 943 documents for metaterm queries and 139 for MeSH term queries. The recall of MeSH term queries was 0.44 (compared to 1 for metaterm queries) and the precision were identical for MeSH term and metaterm queries.


CONCLUSIONS
Metaconcept such as CISMeF metaterms allows a better recall with a similar precision that MeSH terms in a quality controlled health gateway.
Gehanno
Jean-François
JF
GCSIS, LITIS EA 4108, Rouen University Hospital, France.
Thirion
Benoit
B
Darmoni
Stéfan J
SJ
D000043:Abstracting and Indexing; D002377:Catalogs as Topic; D019992:Databases as Topic / Q000145:classification; D006262:Health; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D046650:Medical Subject Headings; D009862:Online Systems; D011786:Quality Control; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled