HONselect: multilingual assistant search engine operated by a concept-based interface system to decentralized...

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Health Information Retrieval
• Knowledge Management

Background:

• Internet users, both new and experienced, face challenges in efficiently retrieving accurate medical and health information.
• The vast amount of online health information necessitates effective tools for users to locate relevant documents.

Purpose of the Study:

• To reduce the time and effort required for searching and locating medical and health information.
• To develop a tool that improves the efficiency and accuracy of document retrieval from diverse knowledge databases.

Main Methods:

• Development of HONselect, a multilingual "one-stop searching" tool.
• Utilizing the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (NLM, MeSH) vocabulary and classification for knowledge representation.
• Providing a single web interface for databases in English, French, and German with navigational capabilities.

Main Results:

• HONselect offers improved efficiency in retrieving documents.
• The tool provides access to a curated selection of relevant and accurate documents from various sources.
• Users can navigate term hierarchies and access documents from high-quality suppliers like MEDLINE and ClinicalTrials.gov.

Conclusions:

• HONselect is a free, online, multilingual tool that enhances the search for quality medical and health information.
• The tool's foundation on the MeSH thesaurus ensures accurate, up-to-date, and high-level document retrieval.
• It addresses the need for a reliable and efficient method to access a breadth of health knowledge resources.