To the Editor:—In their article in JAMIA, Malet et al1 developed a medical core metadata (MCM) model to enhance Internet health document retrieval. The MCM uses the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard, as do 44 others in various fields (http://purl.org/DC/projects/subject.htm#medicine) and another in medicine, CISMe2 (http://www.chu-rouen.fr/cismef/). In addition, MCM and CISMeF use the MeSH thesaurus.
The MCM (see Table 2 of the article by Malet et al.) and CISMeF (▶, here) resource-type controlled lists include some Medline publication types and some new resource types specific to the Internet. Resource type describes the nature of the resource, and MeSH describes the subject of the resource. For example, in the case of a clinical guideline about carbon monoxide intoxication, “carbon monoxide poisoning” is the MeSH keyword and “clinical guidelines” is the resource type. The MCM resource-type list has omitted some major resource types, such as clinical guidelines, consensus development conferences, periodicals, societies, libraries, foundations, institutions, hospitals, and universities. In contrast, the CISMeF resource-type list includes the previous resource (N = 54) and contains a hierarchic structure to permit the explode command.
Table 1.
CISMeF Controlled List of Resource Types
| Advertisements (PT) |
| Architectural drawings (PT) |
| Commercial company |
| Community networks |
| Database (PT) |
|
| Directory |
|
| Education |
|
| Establishment, institution, organization |
| Foundation |
| Hospital |
|
| Image database |
| Library |
| Museum |
| Newsgroup and discussion list |
| Patient information |
| Periodicals (PT) |
| Publisher |
| Research structure |
| Scientific society |
| Search tools |
| Society |
| Software |
| Text |
|
| Trade association, trade society |
| Note: PT indicates MEDLINE publication type. |
The CISMeF medical librarian (B.T.) is a member of the DC Type Working Group (http://purl.org/DC/groups/type.htm). At the Library of Congress Web site (http://www.loc.gov/marc/dc/typequalif.html), Rebecca Guenther, from the Library and chair of this working group, has collected the DC projects using their own lists of values for types.
In conclusion, we agree with Malet et al. that the development of a standard metadata scheme for health resources is a major issue. International cooperation under the IMIA umbrella could maximize the success of this project.—Stefan J. Darmoni, MD, PhD, Benoit Thirion
References
- 1.Malet G, Munoz F, Appleyard R, Hersh W. A model for enhancing Internet medical document retrieval with “medical core metadata.” J Am Med Inform Assoc. 1999;62:163-172. [DOI] [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- 2.Thirion B, Darmoni SJ. Simplified access to MeSH Tree Structures on CISMeF. Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1999;87(4):480-1. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]