MTag: A model to enable collaborative medical tagging in medical blogs

Abstract Collaborative tagging is the practice of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize online content. Current collaborative tagging activities within medical blogs are done using free words chosen by users. These tags are not based on standard medical terminologies. The resulted tags are inefficient in terms of medical meanings and semantic interlinking capabilities. In this paper, MTag is presented as a new model for collaborative tagging in medical blogs, i.e. tagging blog entries with medical information. MTag includes two modules: the service module and the semantic module. The service module enables health professionals provide blog posts with auto-completed tags that represent actual medical terms and categorize their tags. Tags are mapped to URIs from online medical knowledge datasets to clarify their medical meaning. At the same time, the semantic module is equipped with a tag ontology which extends the Social Semantic Cloud of Tags (SCOT) ontology to consent medical specifications of tags. Eventually, a prototype is developed to test the MTag’s two modules. The results show that both modules are working properly.