A model for enhancing Internet medical document retrieval with "medical core metadata"

Objective: Finding documents on the World Wide Web relevant to a specific m edical information need can be difficult. The goal of this work is to defin e a set of document content description tags, or metadata encodings, that c an be used to promote disciplined search access to Internet medical documen ts. Design: The authors based their approach on a proposed metadata standard, t he Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, which has recently been submitted to t he Internet Engineering Task Force. Their model also incorporates the Natio nal Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) vocabulary and ME DLINE-type content descriptions. Results: The model defines a medical core metadata set that can be used to describe the metadata for a wide variety of Internet documents. Conclusions: The authors propose that their medical core metadata set be us ed to assign metadata to medical documents to facilitate document retrieval by Internet search engines.