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J Am Med Inform Assoc 2000;7:108-109 doi:10.1136/jamia.2000.0070108
  • Letters to the Editor

A Standard Metadata Scheme for Health Resources

  1. Stefan J Darmoni,
  2. Benoit Thirion
  1. Affiliation of the authors: Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France
  1. Correspondence and reprints: Stefan J. Darmoni, MD, PhD, Computing Department, Rouen University Hospital, 1 rue de Germont, F76031 Rouen, France; e-mail: 〈stefan.darmoni{at}chu-rouen.fr〉
  • Received 14 September 1999
  • Accepted 20 September 1999

To the Editor:—In their article in JAMIA, Malet et al1 developed a medical core metadata (MCM) model to enhance Internet health document retrieval. The MCM uses the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard, as do 44 others in various fields (http://purl.org/DC/projects/subject.htm#medicine) and another in medicine, CISMe2 (http://www.chu-rouen.fr/cismef/). In addition, MCM and CISMeF use the MeSH thesaurus.

The MCM (see Table 2 of the article by Malet et al.) and CISMeF (Table 1, here) resource-type controlled lists include some Medline publication types and some new resource types specific to the Internet. Resource type describes the nature of the resource, and MeSH describes the subject of the resource. For example, in the case of a clinical guideline about carbon monoxide intoxication, “carbon monoxide poisoning” is the MeSH keyword and “clinical guidelines” is the resource type. The MCM resource-type list has omitted some major resource types, such as clinical guidelines, consensus development conferences, periodicals, societies, libraries, foundations, institutions, hospitals, and universities. In contrast, the CISMeF resource-type list includes the previous resource (N = 54) and contains a hierarchic structure to permit the explode command.

View this table:
Table 1

CISMeF Controlled List of Resource Types

The CISMeF medical librarian (B.T.) is a member of the DC Type Working Group (http://purl.org/DC/groups/type.htm). At the Library of Congress Web site (http://www.loc.gov/marc/dc/typequalif.html), Rebecca Guenther, from the Library and chair of this working group, has collected the DC projects using their own lists of values for types.

In conclusion, we agree with Malet et al. that the development of a standard metadata scheme for health resources is a major issue. International cooperation under the IMIA umbrella could maximize the success of this project.—Stefan J. Darmoni, MD, PhD, Benoit Thirion

References

  1. ↵
    1. Malet G,
    2. Munoz F,
    3. Appleyard R,
    4. Hersh W
    . A model for enhancing Internet medical document retrieval with “medical core metadata. ” J Am Med Inform Assoc 1999;62:163–172.
  2. ↵
    1. Thirion B,
    2. Darmoni SJ
    . Simplified access to MeSH Tree Structures on CISMeF. Bull Med Libr Assoc 1999;87(4):480–1.
    [Medline]

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