On the way to a Web based hospital information system: concepts for the use of a medical data dictionary to present context sensitive information in an intranet environment.

Many authors have promoted the www-paradigm to build modern hospital information systems. However currently web-based applications are better suited to information "browsing" than to build complex data entry features. This prompted us to start with our first web based developments inside the Giessen University Hospital Information System in the field of pure presentation of stored knowledge and information. This article describes the concepts which will be used in Giessen to convert available information sources to the www paradigm and to implement context-sensitive knowledge presentation mechanisms inside the clinical information system. The approach is based upon a web-based medical data dictionary server. The data dictionary is used to map terms of interest, chosen from the clinical user during work with a HIS-application, to a semantic network of relationships. The dictionary server will follow those semantic links in order to find and display the webpages, which are linked to the subject.