The Evolution of Healthcare Applications in the Web 2.0 Era - Computational Intelligence in Healthcare: Advanced Methodologies - page 305

In the following, we provide an overview of the most popular Web 2.0 services,
present their main features and give reference to several online implementations in
medical applications.

3.1 Web 2.0 Services

There is already an important amount of Web 2.0 applications [6], [7], [15], [16],
which are related to medical issues. Blogs, wikis, folksonomies, podcasts and vidcasts
are among them. In the following we give details on these applications, on the way in-
formation is published, annotated and consumed and on their potential use in favour
of the medical community.
The main characteristics of all Web 2.0 services, which are presented in Table 2
are: a) contribution is communal, b) publishing has been replaced by participation and
c) access is public or at least is granted to the members of the medical community.
Anonymity and identity issues are solved with the use of virtual identities. They are
mainly asynchronous since it is infeasible for all community members to be concur-
rently online.

Blogs
Blogs (Weblogs) are Web sites that function as online journals. They present
published content in reverse publication date blogs. One or more persons may con-
tribute with articles (posts), comments, links to other Web sites and multimedia
content. Blog participants form virtual groups based on their common interests.

Table 2. Web 2.0 applications. Examples and open source solutions

Web 2.0 apps Purpose Online examples/tools

www.docnotes.net
http://casesblog.blogspot.com

Blogs, photo blogs Provide medical consultation,
news, announcements, photos,
allow comments

www.wordpress.com
www.flickr.com
http://www.doctorslounge.com/rss
http://www rss4medics.com
www.medicalnewstoday.com

RSS feeds Instantly receive medical in-

formation right after it is pub-
lished

and
news syndication

http://www.feedforall.com
http://conversations.acc.org/
http://www.annals.org/podcast/index.shtml
http://www.clevelandclinic.org

Podcast and Provide consults, courses and

information in audio and video
stream format

Vidcast

http://video.google.com/
http://www.archive.org/details/movies
http://askdrwiki.com/mediawiki/
http://www radiopaedia.org

Wiki Collaboratively construct an

archive of medical knowledge

http://www.mediawiki.org/
http://www.splitbrain.org/go/dokuwiki
http://www.bibsonomy.org/
http://www.citeulike.org/

Collaborative
T agging

Link to informative content,
e valuate sources and organize
knowledge

and

Social
bookmarking

http://www.flickr.com/
http://www.connotea.org/

Cyberspaces Provide a virtual and interac-

tive learning environment

http://www.secondlife.com
http://opensimulator.org/