WORKSHOP

"Towards a collaborative, open, semantic web of trust for health information on the web: Interoperability of Health Information Gateways"

12th Sep 2002 at Brussels, Belgium

Chair: Gunther Eysenbach, M.D.
(Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University of Toronto, Canada and
Research Unit for Cybermedicine & eHealth, University of Heidelberg, Germany)

PDF of the Workshop Report [317 kB]

OVERVIEW

Facing new possibilities and technical innovations, especially the idea of the semantic web, the MedCIRCLE Consortium intended to bring together third-party evaluation services in the health field, for example Government sponsored health portals, Health Information Gateways, Annotation/Evaluation Services, and Kitemarking/Certification Services - basically everybody who is annotating, cataloguing or evaluating health information on the web. Leading key players in the field of health information quality from all over the world attended this event.

The workshop focussed on metadata and semantic web technologies, and demonstrated the use of these technologies for a decentralised, distributed quality management of health information on the web.

The following topics were discussed:

• What does the "semantic web" mean for metadata provider?
  
  
• How can third-party evaluation services (health gateways, accreditation services etc.) col-laborate to achieve interoperability and to create a semantic web of evaluated health in-formation, without giving up their own identity?
  
  
• How can open source semantic web tools, developed in the EU projects MedCERTAIN and MedCIRCLE, be used by third-party evaluation services?
  
  
• How can third-party evaluation services stimulate health information providers to provide metadata?
  
  
• How can end-users (consumers, researchers and policy makers) use and benefit from such technologies?
  

PRESENTATIONS

Keynote Presentation: The vision of the Semantic Web download PDF of the presentation [662 kB]	Michael Sintek (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH), Kaiserslautern, Germany and visiting researcher at Stanford Medical Informatics Dept., Stanford University, Stanford, USA)
MedCIRCLE: A collaboration for Internet rating, certification, labeling and evaluation of health information presentation is available at: http://yi.com/home/EysenbachGunther/talks/medcircle-workshop-brussels.htm	Gunther Eysenbach (Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University of Toronto, Canada and Research Unit for Cybermedicine & eHealth, University of Heidelberg, Germany)
Integration of a HIDDEL metadata element subset in the CISMeF metadata PDF of the presentation [297 kB]	Stefan Darmoni (CISMeF, France)
HIDDEL metadata impementation at COMB: Web Medica Acreditada in Spain PDF of the presentation [611 kB]	Miquel Angel Mayer (Col·legi Oficial de Metges de Barcelona (COMB), Spain)
Perspectives of health information at AQUMED: HIDDEL implementation to foster interoperability by using machine processable metadata PDF of the presentation [1,75 MB]	Michael Fiene (Agency for Quality in Medicine (AQuMed), Germany)

PARTICIPANTS

• AFGIS (Aktionsforum Gesundheitsinformationssystem), Germany

• Agency for Quality in Medicine (AQuMed), Germany

• BIOME, U.K.

• Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, University of Toronto, Canada

• CISMeF, France

• European Commission, DG Information Society

• European Committee for Standardization (CEN)

• German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Germany

• Health on the Net Foundation (HON)

• Healthfinder, U.S.A.

• HealthInsite, Australia

• Institute of Telematics, Germany

• National electronic Library for Health, UK

• Research Unit for Cybermedicine & eHealth, University of Heidelberg, Germany

• U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S.A.

• URAC, U.S.A.

• Web Medica Accreditada, Col·legi Oficial de Metges de Barcelona (COMB), Spain

• WHO, Regional Office for Europe, Denmark

• World Health Organization

RESULTS

The workshop was attended by 24 participants from three continents (Europe, North-America, Australia), all representatives of major health information gateways, accreditors, or similar potential providers metadata.

The workshop took place in a pleasant atmosphere and provided many interesting approaches and points of view both on the need and the requirements of using HIDDEL as a standardized machine-readable metadata vocabulary to weave a global, collaborative, open semantic web of trust for health information.

The participants actively discussed the advantages of an open RDF repository describing health information on the Word Wide Web.

In the aftermath of the workshop, several participants expressed interest in

1. implementing HIDDEL,
2. creating a steering committee which further develops and promotes the idea of a global collaboration of health information gateways and accreditors, and
3. participating in a joint follow-up project.

ORGANIZATIONAL COLLABORATION STRUCTURE OF HIDDEL IMPLEMENTERS

(Last update: 2002-12-19)