Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3.2.1 Online Health Information Services
With the growing importance of the Internet, one could also witness the growth of
online health-oriented information platforms such as PubMed
1
and Scopus,
2
which
enable researchers and professionals to check up on latest research results on bio-
medical topics [
8
]. While these databases provide detailed access to state-of-the-art
research results, they are less suitable for the general public who would like to check
up on symptoms that they are experiencing. According to Morahan-Martin, up to
4.5% of all Internet searches are about health-related topics [
25
], indicating the sig-
nificance of this topic in our life. An overview of different resources in the Web that
can be used for this information gathering task is provided by Johnson et al. [
18
].
Generally, three types of services can be identified: (a) Professionally maintained
health advice and information services where users can check their symptoms in a
constantly updated database (e.g., the NHS Direct
3
service maintained by the Eng-
lish National Health Service) or check up on public service announcements (e.g.,
by the World Health Organization), (b) unsupervised sources such as Wikipedia and
(c) discussions of similar cases in online forums, blog posts, or biased advertise-
ments for specific products that can be retrieved by standard Web search engines.
From a medical point of view, relying on such sources is not recommended and the
consultation of a professional is highly advised. Therefore, the American Medical
Library Association recommends to “trust your physician, not a chat room” [
9
].
Morahan-Martin suggests to approach this unconsidered information handling by
asking physicians to point their patients to reliable health portals and to work on
improving such sites, e.g., by improving search and retrieval techniques. Our works
builds on her suggestion.
3.2.2 Computer-Supported Knowledge Bases
In the healthcare domain, an exact and unambiguous definition of diseases, symp-
toms, etc., is indispensable. Onlywhen it is clear what the problem (disease) is, physi-
cians can say how to treat it. Given the complex nature of this topic, physicians have
to rely on an extensive knowledge base. Traditionally, this knowledge base has been
maintained in topics and journals but since the introduction of computer-based knowl-
edge systems, methods have been developed that support physicians in the anamnesis
process. A promising method that allows for a structured processing of data is the use
of ontologies. Ontologies define “the concepts, relationships, and other distinctions
that are relevant for modeling a domain” [
11
]. Ontologies, in the context of computer
and information sciences, are also machine-readable and sharable. Thus, ontologies
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