A MeSH based intelligent search intermediary for Consumer Health Information Systems.

GIN Austria (Gesundheitsinformationsnetz Austria) offers patients and consumers reliable medical knowledge about diseases, wellness and disease management in an easy understandable way and enables them to quick and incessant access to informations about the Austrian health system and Austrian health organizations. To achieve full customer (patients, citizens) satisfaction to find relevant information we propose a concept of a vector-model oriented IR-Tool based on the controlled vocabulary of the MeSH Thesaurus (german version). By this approach users who are often not used to scientific terms and expressions are supported to build up their own query with MeSH Main Headings. In a second step broader and narrower Main Headings are added to the query vector by the system. For this calculation an adapted version of the Floyd-Warshall algorithm for directed, azyclic graphs is used. The tool is part of the GIN Search Modul, which will ease gathering health information from different heterogenous internet datasources.

A multilingual medical thesaurus browser for patients and medical content managers.

This paper introduces a user-friendly browser interface which integrates multilingual search and browsing functionalities within medical thesauri via the internet. The tool is being developed as part of the GIN Austria Patient Information System and is based on an adapted datamodel of the MeSH thesaurus. A prototype offers the possibility to build up queries and export lists of MeSH main headings collected during browsing the relevant MeSH trees. The thesaurus browser can be used both by patients and citizens to build queries based on a controlled vocabulary to match them with existing documents within GIN and by medical information managers to find out appropriate keywords for interactive tagging or indexing of medical contents. A key component of this tool is the flexible choice of different languages of the MeSH datasource as well as of the user interface. Both can be changed independently at any point during a session. Another central aspect is the use of the UMLS Metathesaurus in combination with localized Thesaurus versions due to existing international character set problems.

A MeSH based intelligent search intermediary for consumer health information systems.

GIN AUSTRIA (Gesundheitsinformationsnetz AUSTRIA) offers patients and consumers reliable medical knowledge about diseases, wellness and disease management in an easy understandable way and enables them to quick and incessant access to informations about the Austrian health system and Austrian health organizations. To achieve full customer (patients, citizens) satisfaction to find relevant information we propose a concept of a vector-model oriented IR-Tool based on the controlled vocabulary of the MeSH Thesaurus (german version). By this approach users who are often not used to scientific terms and expressions are supported to build up their own query with MeSH Main Headings. In a second step broader and narrower Main Headings are added to the query-vector by the system. The tool is part of the GIN Search Modul, which will ease gathering health information from different heterogenous internet datasources.