SGML-based construction and automatic organization of comprehensive medical textbook on the Internet

The amount of knowledge required in practical medicine is large and ever increasing. Medical staff must select and use appropriate pieces of the knowledge from this flood of medical information. Recent Internet technology may be solving these problems because it makes information open to the public immediately after it is created and enables many people to share it. Medical resources on the Internet are however currently not always well organized, because these are often voluntarily provided by the experts of a particular field. We therefore decided to create a comprehensive medical database on the Internet, which is well organized, and of a high quality for practical medical use. In order to make full use of the benefits provided by electronic media, we created a new structured data set of information. We then commissioned authors to write manuscripts from which we created Standard General Mark-up Language (SGML) documents. We then wrote a translation program that took the SGML and automatically created a fully inter-linked HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) document. The translation program generated 4,814 HTML files created from 1,373 number of SGML documents. The total data size including pictures was about 640 MB. 205,775 related links were created. We then published our electronic medical textbook described in HTML publicly on the Internet. Using SGML-based structured data, we constructed a complex electronic medical textbook created organically from simple SGML instances. Our electronic medical textbook is systematic and comprehensive, and has a homogeneous structure. We believe that this is the first comprehensive medical textbook available on the Internet. Furthermore, it was found that our approach to the electronic medical textbook has two major advantages. One is automatic generation of inter-links among documents, and another is easy to maintain documents. In addition, once we construct the electronic textbase in SGML format, the data can be utilized to various application programs on different platforms. Making use of this feature, we are now planning to develop a new style of electronic textbook, which is closely integrated with a Hospital Information System (HIS). The plan would provide medical staff with on-demand access to the electronic medical textbook while using HIS terminals.