Abstract
Internet information undergoes no quality controls and virtually anybody can publish
anything. Because of this, it is difficult for searchers to take information retrieved
from the Internet at face value. A related problem is the uncontrolled promotion of
medical products on the Internet. A further problem of today’s Internet is that authors
use no uniform keywords and other descriptive labels, which deteriorates the quality
of search results. A solution for all these problems could be widespread use of descriptive
and evaluative metainformation associated with medical Internet information. Our concept
is based on a recently established infrastructure for assigning metadata to Internet
information, the so-called PICS Standard (Platform for Internet Content Selection).
We prototyped a PICS-based rating vocabulary for medical information (med-PICS), containing
descriptive and evaluative categories, to be used by the webauthor and third-party
label services (such as medical associations), respectively. We propose an international
effort to assign metadata to medical Internet information.
Keywords
Public Health - Computer Communication Networks - Standards - Information Services
- Quality Control
