Health Consumer Information in a Quality-controlled Gateway

Internet has become a major source of health information but medical information retrieval remains difficult for both the health professional and the patients. In this poster we describe CISMeF-patients which is a sub-part of CISMeF, a structured quality-controlled subject gateway. CISMeF-patients has been designed for the patients, their families and the general public who are often unfamiliar with the medical domain and vocabulary. The CISMeF-patients resources are described using the Dublin Core metadata and are indexed thanks to a terminology which ‘encapsulates’ the MeSH thesaurus. Unlike Medline-plus and Medline, CISMeF-patients and CISMeF share the same terminology. Therefore a CISMeF-patients end-user can extend his query into the CISMeF catalogue (e.g. to search for teaching resources or clinical guidelines).