Gastrointestinal Motility Online Educational Endeavor

Abstract

Medical information has been traditionally maintained in books, journals, and specialty periodicals. Now, a growing number of people, including patients and caregivers, turn to a variety of sources on the Internet, most of which are run by commercial entities, to retrieve healthcare-related information. The next area of growth will be sites that focus on specific fields of medicine, featuring high quality data culled from scholarly publications, operated by eminent domain specialists. One such site is being developed for the field of Gastrointestinal Motility; it further augments the innovations of existing healthcare information sites with the intention of serving the diverse needs of lay people, medical students, and experts in the field. The site, called Gastrointestinal Motility Online, leverages the strengths of online textbooks, which have a high degree of organization, in conjunction with the strengths of online journal collections, which are more comprehensive and focused, to produce a knowledge base that can be easily updated, but still provides authoritative and high quality information to users. In addition to implementing existing Web technologies such as Wiki- and Amazon-style commenting options, Gastrointestinal Motility Online uses automatic methods to assemble information from various heterogeneous data sources to create a coherent, cogent, and current knowledge base serving a diverse base of users.