Abstract
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a critical source of information for healthcare. Because of this, systems for allowing increased efficiency and effectiveness of information retrieval and discovery are critical. Increased intelligence in web pages will allow information sharing and discovery to become vastly more efficient .The semantic web is an umbrella term for a series of standards and technologies that will support this development.
Key Terms in this Chapter
PubMed: Web portal to the National Library of Medicine Bibliographic Database.
HL7: A medical message system standard.
W3C: The World Wide Web steering committee.
Electronic Health Record: A system of storing information about a patient to assist in diagnosis and treatment.
MeSH: Medical Subject Headings. Index terms used by NLM.
XML: Extensible Markup Language. A standard set by W3C for documents that can include description of the meanings of items.
Semantic: Of or relating to meaning or the study of meaning.
WWW: The World Wide Web. A system using data and program protocols that allow simple publishing and transfer of information.
Ontology: A rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations.