Abstract

Finding documents on the World Wide Web relevant to a specific medical information need can be difficult. To address this problem, we have developed a set of document content description tags, or metadata encodings, which can be used to promote disciplined search access to Internet medical documents. We have built our approach on a proposed metadata standard, the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, which has recently been submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force. Our proposal incorporates the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings vocabulary and MEDLINE-type content descriptions to define a Medical Core Metadata Set. We propose this strategy for assigning metadata to medical documents to facilitate document retrieval by search engines.

Citations