Trends in medical information retrieval on Internet

Information on the World Wide Web is unstructured, distributed, multimedia and multilingual. Many tools have been developed to help users search for u seful information: subject hierarchies, general search engines, browsers an d search assistants. Although helpful, they present serious limitations, ma inly in terms of precision, multilingual indexing and distribution. In this paper, we cover some on-line solutions to medical information discovery an d present our own approach, the MARVIN (multi-agent retrieval vagabond on i nformation network) project, which tackles medical information research wit h specialized cooperative retrieval agents. We also draw some outlines for future extensions. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.