MedCERTAIN: quality management, certification and rating of health information on the Net

MedCERTAIN (MedPICS Certification and Rating of Trustworthy Health Information on the Net, http://www.medcertain.org/) is a recently launched international project funded under the European Union's (EU) "Action Plan for safer use of the Internet. It provides a technical infrastructure and a conceptual basis for an international system of "quality seals", ratings and self-labelling of Internet health information, with the final aim to establish a "trustmark" for networked health information. Digital "quality seals" are evaluative metadata (using standards such as PICS = Platform for Internet Content Selection, now being replaced by RDF/XML) assigned by trusted third-party raters. The project also enables and encourages self-labelling with descriptive meta-information by web authors. Together these measures will help consumers as well as professionals to identify high-quality information on the Internet. MedCERTAIN establishes a fully functional demonstrator for a self- and third-party rating system enabling consumers and professionals to filter harmful health information and to positively identify and select high quality information. We aim to provide a system which allows citizens to place greater trust in networked information, exemplified in the domain of health information, whilst also making a significant contribution for similar projects with different target domains. The project will demonstrate how PICS-based content rating and filtering technologies can automate and exploit value-adding resource description services. It further proposes standards for interoperability of rating services.