Title: Consumer health information organising and mobile acquiring based on topic maps

Authors: Junsheng Zhang; Yunchuan Sun; Yingying Li; Huilin Wang

Addresses: IT Support Center, Institute of Scientific and Technical of Information of China, Beijing 100038, China ' Business School, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China ' IT Support Center, Institute of Scientific and Technical of Information of China, Beijing 100038, China ' IT Support Center, Institute of Scientific and Technical of Information of China, Beijing 100038, China

Abstract: It is difficult for consumers to find, understand and share health information due to the limitations of the current health information systems. Major problems include the missing of connections between multilingual medical terms and the gap between obscure medical terminologies used by experts and common vocabularies used by consumers. This paper utilises the topic maps model to organise consumer health information by linking professional medical terminologies in different languages and the corresponding common vocabularies. The proposed approach is applied into organising bilingual (Chinese and English) consumer health information resources in the diabetes domain. Topic maps tools designed by the Ontopia corporation are used to organise the consumer health information resources about diabetes mellitus. Experiment results show that topic maps of health information are suitable for bilingual health information organising and mobile information acquiring on mobile devices.

Keywords: consumer health information; multilingual terms; medical terms; mobile devices; topic maps; diabetes; health information systems; HIS; medical terminologies; common vocabularies; bilingual health information; Chinese; English.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2016.078476

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2016 Vol.23 No.1/2, pp.46 - 59

Received: 31 Jul 2014
Accepted: 15 Dec 2014
Published online: 22 Aug 2016 *

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