Visual representation of Health Information on the Internet: Interactive graphical maps.  

Internet Health 2003;1:7

Vinod Scaria
Center for Cybermedicine and Internet Research
Calicut

Correspondence:

Vinod Scaria
Perumcheril, 33/4711
Malaparamba
Calicut 673009
Kerala, India
E-Mail: vinodscaria@yahoo.co.in

Introduction 

Information on the Internet has been steadily growing over time. Organizing this infinitely growing mass of information is laborious. It must be amazing to note that even the largest search engines index only close to half of this incredible chunk of Information. Google indexes less than 4X10 ⁹ WebPages. Health information forms just a fraction of these. There are a number of tools that visually organize this information that the user can visually navigate in cyberspace, like someone cruising along the streets.

Maps are interactive tools that can spatially render information before the user so that he can navigate in the virtual space by virtue of his cognitive abilities. The information can be rendered in two [Information space maps] or three [information landscapes] dimensions. Thus it can represent more information in less space.

Information mapping is a rapidly growing technology with application in different domains, and health applications are one of the most prominent of these.Here we discuss three prominent websites offering maps on health resources.

Map.net:

URL: http://www.map.maps.net

Map.Net uses Antarti.ca’s Visual net mapping technology. The website organises the websites derived from the Open Directory Project’s [http://www.dmoz.org] Database and superimposes it onto the map of Antarctica

The regions are divided based on the prevalence of the number of websites in each specific category. Thus the visitor can get a glimpse of what is the actual number of websites in each category. The website can be used to navigate around 2.5million websites.

Health on the Map

As expected, the Health category occupies only a minor proportion of the whole landscape. The Health category is subdivided into 31 subcategories ranging from Ageing to women's Health, and boasts of 49094 websites.

The website marks each category by a target sign which is graphically described on the basis of the thickness of each segment. The outer black circle thickness demonstrates the number of outgoing links, while that of the inner white circle describes the number of incoming links. The central red spot describes the number of pages in the website.

Glancing through the health category, one can clearly visualize prominent websites like the that of the Health on the Net foundation [ http://www.hon.ch  ], alcoholics-anonymous[ http://www.alcoholics-anonymous.org  ]etc.

Medical Citation Map

In addition, the website also hosts other demos on health related fields. The demo based on PubMed: the Medical Citation Map, based on the NLM's bibliographic database Pubmed is also very interesting and informative

HealthCybermap

URL: http://healthcybermap.semanticweb.org

This unique map uses the GIS technology to map information. It utilizes GIS and Clinical coding scheme thus correlating the semantic relation of coding system to the semantic distance on the map.

The map currently has six research pilot interfaces covering about 1600 documents. Not all interfaces are visual.

The maps built on human body metaphors helps the user in spatially correlating information with the image feedback. There is also a colour coding system, which signifies the number of documents pertaining to that specific topic, thus giving an orientation regarding the ‘depth’ of information available.

Kartoo

URL: http://www.kartoo.com

Kartoo is an interesting meta search engine with visual interface. The query is submitted to multiple search engines and results visually represented on interactive maps using special algorithm. The utility uses Macromedia Flash to represent maps. Classical HTML interfaces are also available. The service is available in 5 languages.

Each website is represented by a ball, the size related to relevance. Pointing the cursor over the ball draws up relations to that website and allows you to dig deep by adding or subtracting terms from the query.

Entrez Genome View :

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/Entrez/hum_srch?chr=hum_chr.inf&query

The Entrez Genome map is a useful utility that lets you browse genes on chromosomes. This utilitu of the NCBI is a vey good example how biomedical information can be rendered on a metaphorical object [here genes on the chromosome].

Conclusions:

One is sure to get lost in the avalanche of ever growing information on the Internet. There are a wide range of promising technologies like GIS and Self-organizing algorithms. The superiority of one single technology cannot be assessed at this time since most of them have not been utilized extensively.

Interactive maps are very useful in conceptualizing and assimilating information on large scale as that on the Internet over a short time and space. Thus they form an inevitable future of Medical/Health information dissemination.

More reading on this topic:

Kamel Boulos MN, Roudsari AV, Carson ER: HealthCyberMap: A Semantic Visual Browser of Medical Internet Resources Based on Clinical Codes and the Human Body Metaphor.
Health Info Libr J 2002, 19(4):189-200 [http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=12485148 ]

Tutarel O: Geographical distribution of publications in the field of medical education. BMC Med Educ 2002, 2(1):3 [http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/2/3/]

Girardin L: Mapping the Virtual Geography of the world-wide web [http://www.girardin.org/luc//cgv/www5/index.html ]

Conflicts of Interest: None

Source of Funding : None

Abbreviations used in this article:

GIS - Geographic Information System.  

Vinod Scaria is the founder Editor of Internet Health and Asian Student Medical Journal.He has written a number of articles on this topic and regularly writes in many newspapers and other publications.He is a consultant to many Indian Medical websites, and he maintains MedLib http://www.medlib.netfirms.com, the largest index of online Medical Libraries.He is also the founder of VirtualMed .

E-Mail: vinodscaria@yahoo.co.in 

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