Drug information portal in Europe: information retrieval with multiple health terminologies

The objective of this work is the creation of a bilingual (French/English) drug information portal (DIP), in a multi-terminological context. The development of the DIP was based on the CISMeF portal, which catalogues and indexes the most important and quality-controlled sources of institutional health information in French. DIP has created specific functionalities related to drug and used specific drugs terminologies and classifications: the ATC classification, the CAS numbers, the French codes CIS, and CIP, as well as trade names and the International Nonproprietary Names of the drugs. DIP is the result of collaboration between the CISMeF team and the VIDAL private Company, specialized in drug information. DIP is conceived to facilitate the user information retrieval using several health terminologies. In the framework of the drug field, using multi-terminological context, indexing drugs with the appropriate codes or/and terms revealed to be very important to have the appropriate information storage and retrieval.