Creating topic hierarchies for large medical libraries

  • Authors:
  • David Sánchez;Antonio Moreno

  • Affiliations:
  • ITAKA-Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain;ITAKA-Intelligent Technologies for Advanced Knowledge Acquisition Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • KR4HC'09 Proceedings of the 2009 AIME international conference on Knowledge Representation for Health-Care: data, Processes and Guidelines
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Web-based medical digital libraries contain a huge amount of valuable, up-to-date health care information. However, their size, their keyword-based access methods and their lack of semantic structure make it difficult to find the desired information. In this paper we present an automatic, unsupervised and domain-independent approach for structuring the resources available in an electronic repository. The system automatically detects and extracts the main topics related to a given domain, building a taxonomical structure. Our Web-based system is integrated smoothly with the digital library's search engine, offering a tool for accessing the library's resources by hierarchically browsing domain topics in a comprehensive and natural way. The system has been tested over the well-known PubMed medical library, obtaining better topic hierarchies than those generated by widely-used taxonomic search engines employing clustering techniques.