Quality labelling of medical web content

As the number of medical websites in various languages increases, it is increasingly necessary to establish specific criteria and control measures that give consumers some guarantee that the health websites they are visiting meet a minimum level of quality standards. Further, reassurance is needed that the professionals offering the information are suitably qualified. The paper briefly presents the current mechanisms for labelling medical web content and introduces the work done in the EC-funded project Quatro. This has defined a vocabulary for quality labels and a schema to deliver them in a machine-processable format. In addition, the paper proposes the development of a labelling platform that will assist the work of medical labelling agencies in automating, up to a certain level, the retrieval of unlabelled medical websites and their labelling, and the monitoring of labelled websites as to whether they are still satisfying the criteria.