The following people are involved with this project:
The MedCERTAIN project will provide a working demonstrator for a self- and third-party health information rating system. Funded under the EU's Internet Action Plan, this project will enable consumers to filter harmful health information and to identify high quality information rated by medical experts.
At present, health information on the Internet undergoes no quality control at the production stage and hence its quality is highly variable; this makes it difficult for consumers to weed out the helpful from the harmful.
The MedCERTAIN project will develop a metadata vocabulary called MedPICS, which will be expressed though the use of XML/RDF (the Resource Discovery Framework). Medical experts will use MedPICS to assign descriptive and evaluative metadata to health information sites.
Software will be developed to ease the process of rating sites and to allow end-users to view the metadata for sites they are browsing. Techniques for filtering sites through "Web kiosk" mechanisms will also be investigated.
The Institute is working on this project with the University of Heidelberg, Dept. Of Clinical Social Medicine, Cybermedicine Unit; and the Finnish Office for Health Care Technology Assessment, National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health.
For further information, see the project's website: