title: Improving information retrieval with multiple health terminologies in a quality-controlled gateway.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The Catalog and Index of French-language Health Internet resources (CISMeF) is a quality-controlled health gateway, primarily for Web resources in French (n=89,751). Recently, we achieved a major improvement in the structure of the catalogue by setting-up multiple terminologies, based on twelve health terminologies available in French, to overcome the potential weakness of the MeSH thesaurus, which is the main and pivotal terminology we use for indexing and retrieval since 1995. The main aim of this study was to estimate the added-value of exploiting several terminologies and their semantic relationships to improve Web resource indexing and retrieval in CISMeF, in order to provide additional health resources which meet the users' expectations.
  
  
  METHODS
  Twelve terminologies were integrated into the CISMeF information system to set up multiple-terminologies indexing and retrieval. The same sets of thirty queries were run: (i) by exploiting the hierarchical structure of the MeSH, and (ii) by exploiting the additional twelve terminologies and their semantic links. The two search modes were evaluated and compared.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The overall coverage of the multiple-terminologies search mode was improved by comparison to the coverage of using the MeSH (16,283 vs. 14,159) (+15%). These additional findings were estimated at 56.6% relevant results, 24.7% intermediate results and 18.7% irrelevant.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The multiple-terminologies approach improved information retrieval. These results suggest that integrating additional health terminologies was able to improve recall. Since performing the study, 21 other terminologies have been added which should enable us to make broader studies in multiple-terminologies information retrieval.
authors.affiliation: LITIS-TIBS EA 4108 & CISMeF Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France.
authors.forename: Lina F
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Soualmia
authors.affiliation: LITIS-TIBS EA 4108 & CISMeF Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France.
authors.forename: Saoussen
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Sakji
authors.affiliation: LITIS-TIBS EA 4108 & CISMeF Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Letord
authors.affiliation: LITIS-TIBS EA 4108 & CISMeF Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France.
authors.forename: Laetitia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Rollin
authors.affiliation: LITIS-TIBS EA 4108 & CISMeF Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Massari
authors.affiliation: LITIS-TIBS EA 4108 & CISMeF Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France.
authors.forename: Stéfan J
authors.initials: SJ
authors.lastname: Darmoni
keywords: Abstracting and indexing; Cataloguing; Controlled; Information storage and retrieval; Internet; Terminology as topic; Vocabulary
references.citation: Proc AMIA Symp. 2001;:17-21
references.pmid: 11825149
references.citation: J Med Libr Assoc. 2005 Oct;93(4):467-79
references.pmid: 16239943
references.citation: BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2008 Oct 27;8 Suppl 1:S2
references.pmid: 19007439
references.citation: Stud Health Technol Inform. 2009;150:497-501
references.pmid: 19745361
references.citation: Int J Med Inform. 2005 Mar;74(2-4):141-50
references.pmid: 15694619
references.citation: Fam Pract. 2008 Aug;25(4):312-7
references.pmid: 18562335
references.citation: Med Arh. 2004;58(1 Suppl 2):138-41
references.pmid: 15137231
references.citation: Methods Inf Med. 1993 Aug;32(4):281-91
references.pmid: 8412823
references.citation: BMC Bioinformatics. 2012;13 Suppl 14:S11
references.pmid: 23095521
references.citation: J Med Libr Assoc. 2012 Jul;100(3):176-83
references.pmid: 22879806
references.citation: AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2008 Nov 06;:470-4
references.pmid: 18998828
references.citation: Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2008 Nov;258 Suppl 5:81-5
references.pmid: 18985301
references.citation: Stud Health Technol Inform. 2006;124:595-600
references.pmid: 17108582
references.citation: AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2008 Nov 06;:586-90
references.pmid: 18998933
references.citation: AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2009 Nov 14;2009:521-5
references.pmid: 20351910
references.citation: Health Info Libr J. 2004 Dec;21(4):253-61
references.pmid: 15606883