Context-based online medical terminology navigation

The World Wide Web is an important hyperspace for health information navigation. To comprehend health information, medical terminology is a main obstacle. Therefore, starting from a medical term t in a document d being read, information consumers often need to navigate to those documents that are relevant to t under the current context of interest (COI), which may be indicated by the background content of d   (e.g., health topic discussed in d)d). However, health information consumers are often unable or unwilling to construct a proper query for the navigation. Therefore, we present a technique COMTN to automatically generate a context-indicative query for a term designated by an information consumer when reading a document. In addition to the term, the query is enhanced with those terms (from the document) that may indicate the current COI of the consumer. Empirical results show that, using the queries generated by COMTN, more relevant information about the designated term may be retrieved from MedlinePlus. Moreover, COMTN is efficient in online query generation, and it may work for evolving health terminology without training. The contributions are significant to online medical knowledge discovery and comprehension, which are essential factors to promote the value of health information.