Méthodes et évolution de la certification de sites de santé sur le Web à travers l’expérience du HONcode

Today, the Web is a media with increasing pervasiveness around the world. Its use is constantly growing and the medical field is no exception. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 80% of Internet users have searched for American medical information in 2006. However, the problem is no longer about finding information but assessing the credibility of the publishers as well as the relevance and accuracy of the documents retrieved from the web. This problem is particularly relevant in the medical area which has a direct impact on the well-being of citizens and in the Web 2.0 context where information publishing is easier than ever. To address the quality of the medical Internet, the HONcode certification proposed by the Health On the Net Foundation (HON) is certainly the most successful initiative. The aims of this paper are to present certification activity through the HONcode experience and to show that certification is more complex than a simple code of conduct. Therefore, we first present the HONcode, its application and its current evolutions. Following that, we give some quantitative results and describe how the final user can access the certified information.