CISMeF: A structured health resource guide

In 1999, the Internet has become a major source of health information. The objective of CISMeF is to catalogue and index the main French-speaking heal th resources. In September 1999, the number of indexed resources totaled ov er 7,100 with a mean of 75 new sites per week. CISMeF uses two standard too ls for organizing information: the Medline bibliographic database MeSH thes aurus and the Dublin Core metadata format. Resources included in CISMeF are described by the following: title, author or creator, subject and keywords , description, publisher, date, resource type, format, identifier, and lang uage. To index resources, CISMeF uses five levels of hierarchy: "meta-term" , category, keyword, subheading, and resource type. CISMeF contains a thema tic index, including medical specialities and an alphabetic index. CISMeF r espects the Met Scoring, criteria to assess the quality of health informati on on the Internet. The CISMeF project offers a valuable tool for the frenc h-speaking health community: 2,500 computer users visit the Web site each w orking day.