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The SHARing Point Server, a new website for sharing health information

From the Pan American Health Organization

A health information system across languages, across data structures, across continents.

The SHARing Point Server is a new website to exchange information in the SHARED Network (Scientists for Health and Research for Development) and can be found at: http://sharingpoint.shared-global.org

This application was launched during the CRICS Congress VI - BIREME, PAHO/WHO meeting in Puebla, Mexico May 6–9, 2003 and is a product based on Collexis Fingerprint technology.

Collexis technology uses a thesaurus to find keywords in text from the source documents or in a query text. It exploits the synonyms to recognize the keywords in the text and to estimate the relevance of the keywords for
denoting that text. A series of keywords with their relative weights together representing a text are referred to as a conceptual Fingerprint.

The SHARing point server has three different data sources, called pillars. A search is performed by default in the SHARED Network pillar, but as soon as you get the results, you can look up the results also for the
other two pillars (Online Journals, and Medline).

Cross-language networking

Cross-language networking is based on a common language. This common language is the thesaurus for one particular domain. For Medicine and Health, it is MeSH (see below) which is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Finnish, Russian, Dutch, Slovak, Slovene, Swedish, Norwegian, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic.

The English 'malaria', the French 'paludisme' and the Spanish 'paludismo' all refer to MeSH's unique ID 'D008288'. In this way each activity, document, or project description in the medical domain can be described by a set of MeSH descriptors found by textual analysis.

MeSH: Medical Subject Headings is the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus. It consists of sets of terms naming descriptors in a hierarchical structure that permits searching at various levels of specificity.

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This message from the Pan American Health Organization, PAHO/WHO, is part of an effort to disseminate information related to equity, health inequality; socioeconomic inequality in health; socioeconomic health differentials. Gender, violence, poverty, health economics, health legislation, ethnicity, ethics, information technology and virtual libraries, research & science issues.

PAHO/WHO Website: http://www.paho.org/English/HDP/