ENDORSED BY

MedCIRCLE - The Collaboration for Internet Rating, Certification, Labelling, and Evaluation of Health Information

educational objective: - recognize quality of health information on the Web, - know abouth gateways that explicitly guide to high quality health information using Semantic Web technology. Participating health information providers are invited to join the collaboration. (Scientific publishing on the Internet, Knowledge management in medicine, International medical collaboration, Semantic Web, Quality of Internet information, Internet technologies and standards, Specialized Internet tools for medicine (search engines, filtering, etc))

MedCIRCLE is an EU-funded semantic web project, that builds on, expands and continues work on rating health information on the Internet piloted within the MedCERTAIN project. In the course of the MedCERTAIN project, we developed the standardized metadata vocabulary HIDDEL (Health Information Disclosure, Description and Evaluation Language) to evaluate and annotate health related websites. The aim of MedCIRCLE is to further develop and refine this vocabulary, and to develop technologies and networks to guide consumers to trustworthy health information on the Internet. In the course of the MedCIRCLE project, we modelled the HIDDEL vocabulary as an ontology and the partners of the project founded the MedCIRCLE collaboration: University of Heidelberg, AQUMED - Agency for Quality in Medicine (ÄZQ), COMB (Medical College of Barcelona) and CISMeF, a gateway developed at Rouen University Hospital. The three latter organisations are gateway sites for consumer health information and evaluate and annotate health information on the WWW using the HIDDEL vocabulary (technically supported by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence DFKI GmbH). The metadata of the annotated websites are expressed in XML/RDF and will be made publicly available. These metadata allow intelligent agents or client-site software to harvest information and opinions about the trustworthiness of health related websites. The collaboration intends to help people, patients and professionals to identify health information useful to them, e.g. by ensuring interoperability of rating services, identifying common standards for recommending websites and exploring possibilities for decentralised, distributed rating systems by creating a network of evaluators, taking into account the power of the Internet as a networked environment. Other subject gateways, accreditation or rating services are invited to join the MedCIRCLE collaboration to weave a global, collaborative, open semantic web of trust for health information.

Acknowledgement: The MedCIRCLE project is funded by the European Union under the Action Plan for Safer Use of the Internet The collaboration consists of: the University of Heidelberg, Department of Clinical Social Medicine; COMB (Medical College of Barcelona), Spain; CISMeF, University of Rouen, France; AQUMED - Agency for Quality in Medicine (ÄZQ), Germany.

Key Words: Semantic web; e-health; metadata; quality of information; collaboration