HealthCyberMap : mapping the health cyberspace using hypermedia GIS and clinical codes

1 Summary " The application of GIS is limited only by the imagination of those who use it. " —Jack Dangermond, President, ESRI HealthCyberMap (<http://healthcybermap.semanticweb.org>) is a Semantic Web service for healthcare professionals and librarians, patients and the public in general that aims at mapping parts of medical/ health information resources in cyberspace in novel ways to improve their retrieval and navigation. The Semantic Web next-generation World Wide Web by giving machine-readable semantics and context to the currently presentation-based Web pages. HealthCyberMap features an unconventional use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to map conceptual spaces occupied by collections of medical/ health information resources. Besides mapping the semantic and non-geographical aspects of these resources using suitable spatial metaphors, HealthCyberMap also collects and maps the geographical provenance of these resources. Some of HealthCyberMap Web interfaces are visual (maps for browsing resources by clinical/ health topic, by provenance and by type), while others are textual (multilingual interfaces for browsing resources by language, and a directory of topical resource categories, besides HealthCyberMap Semantic Subject Search Engine that goes beyond conventional free-text and keyword-based search engines, and supports synonyms, disease variants, subtypes, as well as some semantic relationships between terms). HealthCyberMap adopts a clinical metadata framework built upon a clinical coding scheme (vocabulary or ontology—ICD-9-CM clinical classification in the current pilot service). Clinical coding schemes serve as a reliable common backbone for topical resource indexing, automated topical classification, topical visualisation and navigation of coded resource pools (using suitable metaphors), and enhanced information retrieval and linking. A resource metadata base based on Dublin Core metadata set with HealthCyberMap's own extensions holds information about selected high-quality resources. HealthCyberMap then uses GIS spatialisation methods to generate interactive navigational cybermaps from the metadata base. These visual cybermaps are based on familiar metaphors for image-word association to give users a broad overview and understanding of what is available in this complex conceptual space of medical/ health Internet resources and help them navigate it more efficiently and effectively. HealthCyberMap cybermaps can be considered as semantically-spatialised, ontology-based browsing views of the underlying resource metadata base. Using a clinical coding scheme as a metric for spatialisation (" semantic distance ") is unique to HealthCyberMap and is very much suited for the semantic categorisation and navigation of medical/ health Internet information resources. HealthCyberMap also introduces a useful form of cyberspatial analysis for the detection of topical coverage gaps in its resource pool using choropleth …