Combining different standards and different approaches for health information retrieval in a quality-controlled gateway

Internet as source of information is increasing in preeminence in numerous fields, including health. We describe in this paper the CISMeF project (acronym of Catalogue and Index of French-speaking Medical Sites) which has been designed to help the health information consumers and health professionals to find what they are looking for among the numerous health documents available online. The catalogue is founded on two standards: a set of metadata and a terminology based on the MeSH thesaurus which has the same structure and use as an ontology of the medical domain. The structure of the catalogue allows us to place the project at an overlap between the present Web, which is informal, and the forthcoming Semantic Web. Many features of information retrieval and navigation through the catalogue were developed. These features take into account the kind of the end-user (health professional, medical student, patient). The CISMeF-patients catalogue is a sub-catalogue of CISMeF and is dedicated to the patients and the general public. It shares the same model as CISMeF whereas MEDLINE and MedlinePlus do not. We also propose to couple two approaches (morphological processing and data mining) to help the users by correcting and refining their queries.