FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

• What is MedCIRCLE ?
  
  
• Who is MedCIRCLE ?
  
  
• What are the aims of MedCIRCLE ?
  
  
• What are the objectives of MedCIRCLE ?
  
  
• What means HIDDEL ?
  
  
• Can I download the HIDDEL vocabulary somewhere ?

What is MedCIRCLE ... ?

MedCIRCLE stands for "Collaboration for Internet Rating, Certification, Labeling and Evaluation of Health Information".

MedCIRCLE is a collaboration of trusted European health subject gateways, medical associations, accreditation, certification, or rating services, which all share the common goal to evaluate, describe, or annotate health information on the world-wide-web.

The overarching aim of MedCIRCLE is to guide consumers to trustworthy health information on the Internet.

read more about MedCIRLCE ... >>

Who is MedCIRCLE?

The MedCIRCLE consortium is being formed by the four project partners, which are directly funded by the European Union:

• the Dept. of Clinical Social Medicine (AKS), University of Heidelberg, Germany (Co-ordination)

and three European health portals in Spain, France, and Germany, which are already active in the business of rating/evaluating/accrediting health websites:

• AQUMED, Germany - Agency for Quality in Medicine (ÄZQ), a joint institution of the German Medical Association (GMA) and the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (NASHIP);
  
  
• COMB (Col·legi Oficial de Metges de Barcelona), Spain;
  
  
• CISMeF, a gateway developed at Rouen University Hospital, Rouen, France.

The partners and the project is technically supported by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Kaiserslautern, Germany.

The partners of the project founded the MedCIRCLE collaboration.

read more about the partners... >>

What are the aims of MedCIRCLE?

The MedCIRCLE project aims to develop and promote technologies able to guide consumers to

• trustworthy health information on the Internet,
  
  
• to establish a global web of trust for networked health information,
  
  
• and to empower consumers to "filter" or positively select high quality health information on the web using semi-automatic techniques.

In the course of the project, the project partners will annotate or rate health information and will implement the "Health Information, Disclosure, Description and Evaluation Language" (HIDDEL) in XML/RDF to demonstrate and ensure interoperability of rating services, with the ultimate goal to enable harvesting and dissemination of third-party ratings.

MedCIRCLE will also encourage use of HIDDEL by health information providers to disclose information essential for consumers to assess the quality of websites themselves.

What are the objectives of MedCIRCLE?

• implementation of the „Health Information, Disclosure, Description and Evaluation Language” (HIDDEL) on Spanish, French, English, and German health information gateways, to demonstrate and ensure interoperability of rating services and to enable harvesting and dissemination of third-party ratings,
  
  
• refinement of rating and evaluating procedures at the MedCIRCLE partner sites and striving for methodological convergence,
  
  
• refinement and expansion of HIDDEL, to become a standard vocabulary and inter-change format for self- and third-party ratings of health information.

What means HIDDEL?

HIDDEL stands for "Health Information Disclosure, Description and Evaluation Language".

HIDDEL is a standard vocabulary/metadata language, which can be expressed as PICS/RDF/XML. HIDDEL is designed to be used by

1. information providers to describe and disclose properties of e-health services (self-rating) and
2. third-parties, e.g. by subject gateways, to express third-party opinions about health in-formation providers.

HIDDEL allows consumers to access disclosure (self-rating) information on health websites in a standardised way, and subject gateways to describe which aspects of the site have been evaluated by them and with what results.

read more about HIDDEL ... >>

To browse through the HIDDEL vocabulary, click here ... >>

Can I download the HIDDEL vocabulary somewhere ?

Here, you can download the latest HIDDEL version:

HIDDEL_Vers1.0_en.xls   (MS Excel - File) [100 kB]
HIDDEL_Vers1.0_en.zip   (WinZip - File) [28 kB]

Please note:
HIDDEL is free to download. If you want to implement HIDDEL, please read our HIDDEL Open Vocabulary License first.

(Last update: 2002-12-17)