Kaiser Permanente's "metadata-driven" national clinical intranet

This paper describes the approach taken to build Kaiser Permanente's national clinical intranet. A primary objective for the site is to facilitate resource discovery, which is enabled by the use of "metadata", or data (fields and field values) that describe the various resources available. Users can perform full text queries and/or fielded searching against the metadata. Metadata serves as the organizing principle of the site--it is used to index documents, sort search results, and structure the site's table of contents. The site's use of metadata--what it is, how it is created, how it is applied to documents, how it is indexed, how it is presented to the user in the search and the search results interface, and how it is used to construct the table of contents for the web site--will be discussed in detail. The result is that KP's national clinical intranet has coupled the power of Internet-like full text search engines with the power of MedLine-like fielded searching in order to maximize search precision and recall. Organizing content on the site in accordance with the metadata promotes overall consistency. Issues currently under investigation include how to better exploit the power of the controlled terminology within the metadata; whether the value gained is worth the cost of collecting metadata; and how automatic classification algorithms might obviate the need for manual document indexing.