METADATA MODEL DESCRIPTION

The HIDDEL vocabulary ("Health Informtation Disclosure, Describtion and Evaluation Language") is based on MedPICS("Medical Platform for Internet Content Selection), which is a further development of PICS. PICS has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a technical standard so that people can electronically distribute descriptions of digital works in a simple, computer-readable form.

HIDDEL in its first version was initially developed during the MedCERTAIN project, a joint project of the University of Heidelberg, Germany, the ILRT and FINOHTA, co-funded under the European Union's (EU) "Action Plan for safer use of the Internet" from 5/2000 until 02/2002. It will be further refined and expanded during the MedCIRCLE project.

The metadata vocabulary consists of elements, which may be presented as a taxonomy (tree structure, see Figure below):

To explore all elements, click here.

Examples for basic elements are Infoprovider_feedback_email_technical (containing the email address for technical questions) or Infoprovider_feedback_email_content (for content questions).

Each basic element can in principle be combined with one of 9 sub-elements, for example CHECKED (What is the result of the evaluator verifying the element?), CHECKED_REASON (Explanation for CHECKED), HOW (Description of how users can identify the basic element on the page(s) themselves).

An information provider can for example combine the basic element Infoprovider_feedback_email_content with the subelement HOW and describe in this element "The feedback email is provided at the bottom of each page". A third-party evaluator could use the subelement CHECKED to confirm this, or to express disagreement. For many (basic) elements, a controlled vocabulary exists to complement the free text value, in this case, elements end with "_CV".

Elements further can have attributes, giving additional information about the elements, for example who entered them and when.

In XML, the health information provider could publish on his webpage the following statements indicating his address and the email which should be used for giving feedback:

Rating services or gateways could publish a XML statement as the following:

(Last update: 2002-07-03)