Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

HealthMash is a new knowledge base that bills its mission as promoting health and well-being by providing relevant information of high quality from trusted health sources on the Web, using sophisticated Web 2.0 universal search and discovery technology with Semantic Web Concepts.

Semanticweb.com recently conducted an e-mail interview with Endre Jofoldi, CEO of
Budapest, Hungary-based WebLib — the developer of knowledge bases and specialized, natural-language processing and search technologies that created HealthMash. WebLib provides natural-language processing tools and semantic engineering services to international clients in the U.S. and Europe, and some of its employees also work as individual contractors for the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Its customers include government agencies, universities, and major content providers in the U.S. WebFeat.org, the federated search engine vendor, licensed our clustering technology.

Its technologies, which include its English, medical and, web spellchecker PolySpell, and its clustering engine PolyCluster (available for licensing as separate products), are showcased in PolyMeta.com and the AllPlus.com universal meta-search and discovery engine.

Semanticweb.com: What was the impetus for creating HealthMash?

Jofoldi: It was our personal experience with how difficult it is to find relevant health information of high quality from trusted sources on the Web. In addition, we have been aware of the increasing popularity and importance of consumers looking for health info on the Internet. Fortunately, we have considerable professional expertise in health information retrieval and knowledge bases, so we felt motivated to do something new and useful in this area.

Semanticweb.com: What is your vision for this offering — why, for instance, do you foresee it as more useful/better/differentiated from something like WebMD or other sources of health information?

Jofoldi: There are a lot of good sources of health information on the Web, including WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and Medlineplus, to mention a few. There are even more questionable and/or outright dangerous sources of information, and often the major search engines mix the good and the bad data in their search results. When it comes to one’s health, “second opinions” are very important not only when consulting with doctors, but also in accessing multiple sources of reliable information. By combining a focus on quality information sources with a comprehensive semantic health knowledge base and Web 2.0/Web 3.0 universal meta-search and discovery, we hope to make the best unbiased and personally relevant health information available to people.

Semanticweb.com: The new service is designed to capture the expertise of medical professionals and people everywhere to help with healing. How? And what “sophisticated web 2.0 search and discovery” features will play a role?

Jofoldi: Using statistical and linguistic NLP (natural language processing) techniques and heuristics, our powerful and automatically generated Health Knowledge Base captures the expertise of both health professionals and ordinary people in an unbiased way. The Health Knowledge Base uses the Web as its principal knowledge source to harvest both conventional medical knowledge and alternative approaches, including emerging areas such as integrative medicine.

We do link to open data on the Web and we also utilize our own proprietary Health Knowledge Base and tools. We plan to use semantic web standards to make our knowledge base easily embeddable into other applications.

We consider our universal meta-search and discovery approach pretty “sophisticated” because it allows users to enter their query and retrieve relevant information from all types of information sources and media in a well-organized manner (articles, news, videos, etc). Behind the scenes, HealthMash transparently deals with problems of language and meaning and the Health Knowledge Base is used to allow users to explore their topic by important facets, such as associated concepts, drugs, treatments and so forth.

With HealthMash, we aim to improve on the “best-of-breed” consumer health search engines, such as Medlineplus, MSN Health, Google Health and others, both in terms of the underlying technology and the power of our proprietary Health Knowledge Base.

Semanticweb.com: How are you ensuring the sources will be trusted?

Jofoldi: We ensure that our sources will be trusted by virtue of our strict selection criteria, which include recommendations by trusted organizations like the Medical Library Association, the National Library of Medicine, the Health on the Net Foundation and others.

Semanticweb.com: Is this a for fee service only for health organizations, or can consumers participate?

Jofoldi: HealthMash will be a high quality free consumer search engine for the public. We will make the underlying Health Knowledge Base and technology available to other companies and organizations through an easy to use API for a fee.

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