SAPHIRE International: a tool for cross-language information retrieval.

The world's foremost medical literature is written in English, yet much of the world does not speak English as a primary language. This has led to increasing research interest in cross-language information retrieval, where textual databases are queried in languages other than the one in which they are written. We describe enhancements to the SAPHIRE concept-retrieval system, which maps free-text documents and queries to concepts in the UMLS Metathesaurus, that allow it to accept text input and provide Metathesaurus concept output in any of six languages: English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. An example of the use of SAPHIRE International is shown in the CliniWeb catalogue of clinically-oriented Web pages. A formative evaluation of German terms shows that additional work is required in handling plural and other suffix variants as well as expanding the breadth of synonyms in the UMLS Metathesaurus.

CliniWeb: managing clinical information on the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web is a powerful new way to deliver on-line clinical information, but several problems limit its value to health care professionals: content is highly distributed and difficult to find, clinical information is not separated from non-clinical information, and the current Web technology is unable to support some advanced retrieval capabilities. A system called CliniWeb has been developed to address these problems. CliniWeb is an index to clinical information on the World Wide Web, providing a browsing and searching interface to clinical content at the level of the health care student or provider. Its database contains a list of clinical information resources on the Web that are indexed by terms from the Medical Subject Headings disease tree and retrieved with the assistance of SAPHIRE. Limitations of the processes used to build the database are discussed, together with directions for future research.