Biomedical subjects

Maged N Kamel Boulos

Publications and source records attributed to Maged N Kamel Boulos.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2003

The use of interactive graphical maps for browsing medical/health Internet information resources.

As online information portals accumulate metadata descriptions of Web resources, it becomes necessary to develop effective ways for visualising and navigating the resultant huge metadata repositories as well as the different semantic relationships and attributes of described Web resources. Graphical maps provide a good method to visualise, understand and navigate a world that is too large and complex to be seen directly like the Web. Several examples of maps designed as a navigational aid for Web resources are presented in this review with an emphasis on maps of medical and health-related resources. The latter include HealthCyberMap maps http://healthcybermap.semanticweb.org/, which can be classified as conceptual information space maps, and the very abstract and geometric Visual Net maps of PubMed http://pubmed.antarcti.ca/start. Information resources can be also organised and navigated based on their geographic attributes. Some of the maps presented in this review use a Kohonen Self-Organising Map algorithm, and only HealthCyberMap uses a Geographic Information System to classify Web resource data and render the maps. Maps based on familiar metaphors taken from users' everyday life are much easier to understand. Associative and pictorial map icons that enable instant recognition and comprehension are preferred to geometric ones and are key to successful maps for browsing medical/health Internet information resources.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2003

Location-based health information services: a new paradigm in personalised information delivery.

Brute health information delivery to various devices can be easily achieved these days, making health information instantly available whenever it is needed and nearly anywhere. However, brute health information delivery risks overloading users with unnecessary information that does not answer their actual needs, and might even act as noise, masking any other useful and relevant information delivered with it. Users' profiles and needs are definitely affected by where they are, and this should be taken into consideration when personalising and delivering information to users in different locations. The main goal of location-based health information services is to allow better presentation of the distribution of health and healthcare needs and Internet resources answering them across a geographical area, with the aim to provide users with better support for informed decision-making. Personalised information delivery requires the acquisition of high quality metadata about not only information resources, but also information service users, their geographical location and their devices. Throughout this review, experience from a related online health information service, HealthCyberMap http://healthcybermap.semanticweb.org/, is referred to as a model that can be easily adapted to other similar services. HealthCyberMap is a Web-based directory service of medical/health Internet resources exploring new means to organise and present these resources based on consumer and provider locations, as well as the geographical coverage or scope of indexed resources. The paper also provides a concise review of location-based services, technologies for detecting user location (including IP geolocation), and their potential applications in health and healthcare.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

A simple method for serving Web hypermaps with dynamic database drill-down.

BACKGROUND: HealthCyberMap http://healthcybermap.semanticweb.org aims at mapping parts of health information cyberspace in novel ways to deliver a semantically superior user experience. This is achieved through "intelligent" categorisation and interactive hypermedia visualisation of health resources using metadata, clinical codes and GIS. HealthCyberMap is an ArcView 3.1 project. WebView, the Internet extension to ArcView, publishes HealthCyberMap ArcView Views as Web client-side imagemaps. The basic WebView set-up does not support any GIS database connection, and published Web maps become disconnected from the original project. A dedicated Internet map server would be the best way to serve HealthCyberMap database-driven interactive Web maps, but is an expensive and complex solution to acquire, run and maintain. This paper describes HealthCyberMap simple, low-cost method for "patching" WebView to serve hypermaps with dynamic database drill-down functionality on the Web. RESULTS: The proposed solution is currently used for publishing HealthCyberMap GIS-generated navigational information maps on the Web while maintaining their links with the underlying resource metadata base. CONCLUSION: The authors believe their map serving approach as adopted in HealthCyberMap has been very successful, especially in cases when only map attribute data change without a corresponding effect on map appearance. It should be also possible to use the same solution to publish other interactive GIS-driven maps on the Web, e.g., maps of real world health problems.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

HealthCyberMap: a semantic visual browser of medical Internet resources based on clinical codes and the human body metaphor.

OBJECTIVES: HealthCyberMap (HCM-http://healthcybermap.semanticweb.org) is a web-based service for healthcare professionals and librarians, patients and the public in general that aims at mapping parts of the health information resources in cyberspace in novel ways to improve their retrieval and navigation. METHODS AND SERVICE DESCRIPTION: HCM adopts a clinical metadata framework built upon a clinical coding ontology for the semantic indexing, classification and browsing of Internet health information resources. A resource metadata base holds information about selected resources. HCM then uses GIS (Geographic Information Systems) spatialization methods to generate interactive navigational cybermaps from the metadata base. These visual cybermaps are based on familiar medical metaphors. CONCLUSIONS: HCM cybermaps can be considered as semantically spatialized, ontology-based browsing views of the underlying resource metadata base. Using a clinical coding scheme as a metric for spatialization ('semantic distance') is unique to HCM and is very much suited for the semantic categorization and navigation of Internet health information resources. Clinical codes ensure reliable and unambiguous topical indexing of these resources. HCM also introduces a useful form of cyberspatial analysis for the detection of topical coverage gaps in the resource metadata base using choropleth (shaded) maps of human body systems.

Abstracting and Indexing↗