Management of Medical Website Quality Labels via Web Mining

Abstract

The World Wide Web is an important channel of information exchange in many domains, including the medical one. The ever increasing amount of freely available healthcare-related information generates, on the one hand, excellent conditions for self-education of patients as well as physicians, but on the other hand, entails substantial risks if such information is trusted irrespective of low competence or even bad intentions of its authors. This is why medical Web site certification, also called quality labeling, by renowned authorities is of high importance. In this respect, it recently became obvious that the labelling process could benefit from employment of Web mining and information extraction techniques, in combination with flexible methods of Web-based information management developed within the Semantic Web initiative. Achieving such synergy is the central issue in the MedIEQ project. The AQUA (Assisting Quality Assessment) system, developed within the MedIEQ project, aims to provide the infrastructure and the means to organize and support various aspects of the daily work of labelling experts.