MedCIRCLE: Collaboration for Internet Rating, Certification, Labelling and Evaluation of Health Information on the World-Wide-Web

We describe MedCIRCLE, an EU-funded semantic web project to implement the first steps towards a global, collaborative rating and guidance system for health information proposed in the MedCERTAIN project. In MedCIRCLE, three European gateway sites for consumer health information will implement the metadata vocabulary HIDDEL (Health Information Disclosure, Description and Evaluation Language). HIDDEL allows portals and gateways to make the results of their evaluations accessible as XML/RDF. The three participating national portals are: AQUMED (Agency for Quality in Medicine) patienten-information, de, COMB (Official Medical College of Barcelona) and CISMeF, a quality-controlled health gateway developed at Rouen University Hospital. Other health subject gateways, accreditation, or rating services are invited to join the collaboration simply by implementing HIDDEL on their gateways. Widespread implementation HIDDEL will allow intelligent agents or client-side software to harvest statements and opinions about the trustworthiness of other websites, assisting users in selecting trustworthy websites. The MedCIRCLE project builds on, expands and continues work on rating health information on the Internet piloted within the MedCERTAIN project. While MedCERTAIN provided the core technologies and software for rating and "trustmarking" health information, MedCIRCLE is built around these technologies and involves a wider medical community to assess health information, demonstrating the power of collaborative and interoperable evaluations in a semantic web environment. MedCIRCLE is a project with the overall objective to develop and promote technologies able to guide consumers to trustworthy health information on the Internet, to establish a global web of trust for networked health information, and to empower consumers to positively select high quality health information on the web. Other aims include refinement and expansion of HIDDEL, to become a standard vocabulary and interchange format for self- and third-party ratings of health information.