A Model for Enhancing Internet Medical Document Retrieval with “Medical Core Metadata”
- Correspondence and reprints: Gary Malet, DO, 3181 SW Sam Jackson Park Road, Portland, OR 97201; e-mail: 〈gmalet{at}teleport.com〉
- Received 1 April 1998
- Accepted 23 October 1998
Abstract
Objective Finding documents on the World Wide Web relevant to a specific medical information need can be difficult. The goal of this work is to define a set of document content description tags, or metadata encodings, that can be used to promote disciplined search access to Internet medical documents.
Design The authors based their approach on a proposed metadata standard, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, which has recently been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force. Their model also incorporates the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary and Medline-type content descriptions.
Results The model defines a medical core metadata set that can be used to describe the metadata for a wide variety of Internet documents.
Conclusions The authors propose that their medical core metadata set be used to assign metadata to medical documents to facilitate document retrieval by Internet search engines.
Footnotes
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This work was supported by Fellowship Training grant LM07088 from the National Library of Medicine.
