Abstract
Web 2.0 Applications have gained much power and usability in the last years. A particular case is medicine Web sites, like forums, wikis, and others. In most cases, these sites provide general information without making contact with the physicians. On other side, the CDSS (Clinical Decision Support Systems) are very useful applications, and many of them are ontology based. In this chapter, the authors propose a social Web application that allows patients to make contact with their physicians through a CDSS list of signs. This application combines social Web, CDSS, and Web services.
TopSince the proposal turns around a Web 2.0 Application, we are going to start this section highlighting its main feature. The main feature of the Web 2.0 applications is the collaboration. As is indicated in (Kamel Boulos & Wheeler, 2007) the Web 2.0 applications encourages the human collaboration and interaction due the sense of being in a social environment, and it is benefit for the motivation too because it decreases the isolation that could be a significant barrier. And another feature is that the Web-based environments are useful to obtain help and guidance from others. Another feature is that Web 2.0 allows more participation because the users are readers and writers at the same time.
As it is defined by (Heylighen, 1999), the intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and the collective intelligence is the ability of a group to solve more problems than its individual members. In his paper he says that the concept of collective intelligence has been more used with the growing interest in complex adaptive systems, artificial life and simulated societies, and that we can say that a group exhibit collective intelligence if it members working together can find more or better solutions than the whole of all solutions that would be found by its members working individually. Furthermore he recognizes the problem that occurs when the people play power games. It happens when every member wants to be recognized as the smartest or most important one. He argue that the problem can be solved dividing the entire group in small groups and parallelizing its activities but this implies that the small groups must keep close contact in order to exchange information.
There are some different kinds of Social Web applications, like forums, wikis, blogs, podcast, RSS, and also many Web pages which allow their visitors to write their comments about any theme treated in there.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collective Intelligence: The intelligence obtained from the collaboration.
Health Portals: Web Applications with health content.
Clinical Decision Support Systems: Software designed to assist physicians with decision making task.
Knowledge Base: A database for knowledge management used for the retrieval of knowledge through inference process.
Ontologies: An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization (Gruber, 1992).
Web 2.0 Applications: Web applications that allows the interoperability between users in order to share information and achieve collaboration.
Ontologies: An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization (Gruber, 1992 AU19: The in-text citation "Gruber, 1992" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ).
Web 2.0 Applications: Web applications that allows the interoperability between users in order to share information and achieve collaboration.
E-Health: Healthcare practice supported by electronic processes and communications.
Web Services: Piece of software that use a set of protocols to interchange data between applications.
Diagnosis: The identification of the nature and cause of anything. The relation between the disease and their associated findings.
Knowledge Base: A database for knowledge management used for the retrieval of knowledge through inference process.
Collective Intelligence: The intelligence obtained from the collaboration.
Web Services: Piece of software that use a set of protocols to interchange data between applications.
Clinical Decision Support Systems: Software designed to assist physicians with decision making task.
Health Portals: Web Applications with health content.
E-Health: Healthcare practice supported by electronic processes and communications.
Diagnosis: The identification of the nature and cause of anything. The relation between the disease and their associated findings.