Domain specific multistage query language for medical document repositories

Abstract

Vast amount of medical information is increasingly available on the Web. As a result, seeking medical information through queries is gaining importance in the medical domain. The existing keyword-based search engines such as Google, Yahoo fail to suffice the needs of the health-care workers (who are well-versed with the domain knowledge required for querying) using these they often face results which are irrelevant and not useful for their tasks. In this paper, we present the need and the challenges for a user-level, domain-specific query language for the specialized document repositories of the medical domain. This topic has not been sufficiently addressed by the existing approaches including SQL-like query languages or general-purpose keyword-based search engines and document-level indexing based search. We aim to bridge the gap between information needs of the skilled/semi-skilled domain users and the query capability provided by the query language. Overcoming such a challenge can facilitate effective use of large volume of information on the Web (and in the electronic health records (EHRs)repositories).