Summary
Objectives: Medical social-media provide a new source of information within information gaining
contexts. Facts, experiences, opinions or information on behaviour can be found in
the medical web and could support a broad range of applications. The intention of
this Focus Theme is to bring the existing research together and to show the possi
-bilities, challenges and technologies for Web Science in medicine and healthcare.
Methods: This editorial provides an overview on the landscape of medical social-media and
their possibilities in supporting healthcare. Further, it summarizes the three papers
included in this Focus Theme.
Results and Conclusions: The three papers of this Focus Theme consider different aspects of Web Science in
medicine which are 1) detection of drug interactions from social media, 2) inferring
community structures from online forums and 3) improving access to online videos through
assignment of SNOMED CT terms. All three papers show the potential of medical social-media
in support -ing health information gathering processes from the web. However, several
issues still need to be addressed in future: Methods are necessary for identifying
high quality information from the medical web as well as for processing the language
that is used by social media users to report about their symptoms, diseases and other
health issues.
Keywords
Web science - Social media - Medicine 2.0 - Health 2.0 - Information extraction
