(WWW2002, Hawaii, May 7th-11th 2002)

COLLABORATION FOR INTERNET RATING, CERTIFICATION, LABELING AND EVALUATION OF HEALTH INFORMATION (MEDCIRCLE)

Eysenbach G et al.

We describe MedCIRCLE, an EU-funded semantic web project to implement HIDDEL (Health Information Disclosure, Description and Evaluation Language) on three European gateway sites for consumer health information: AeZQ (Aerztliche Zentralstelle Qualitaetssicherung) Patienteninformation.de, METGES (Official Medical College of Barcelona) and CisMEF, a gateway developed at Rouen University Hospital. Other health subject gateways, accreditation, or rating services are invited to join the collaboration simply by implementing HIDDEL on their gateways, allowing intelligent agents or client-side software to harvest statements and opinions about the trustworthiness of other websites, assisting users in selecting trustworthy websites. The MedCIRCLE project builds on, expands and continues work on rating health information on the Internet piloted within the MedCERTAIN project. While MedCERTAIN provided the core technologies and software for rating and \"trustmarking\" health information, MedCIRCLE is built around these technologies and involves a wider medical community to assess health information, demonstrating the power of collaborative and interoperable evaluations in an semantic web environment. Both projects - MedCIRCLE and MedCERTAIN - are complementary projects with the overall objective 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 positively select high quality health information on the web. Other aims include refinement and expansion of HIDDEL, to become a standard vocabulary and interchange format for self- and third-party ratings of health information.

(Last update: 2002-05-22)