Research has shown that context is critical to disease knowledge and research, and that context and content must be associated to provide disease knowledge and information to the user that is of value. Disease Context Descriptors are terms most often found on health and medical web pages that describe the context of the information and knowledge on diseases and disorders.

The Disease Search page is created dynamically from the Medical Knowledge Base disease entry by applying Disease Context Descriptors. The user specifies the disease or disorder he is searching for or can browse a number of Disease Ontology Views to select a disease or disorder. The disease is matched to the disease entry in the Medical Knowledge Base and the Disease Search Request is formatted with the corresponding Disease Context Descriptors.

Mapping of Disease Context Descriptors

The Disease Search results are displayed by web site source category. Within a Source Category, web pages are displayed according to the web site Medical IQ ranking for the disease class. The Medical IQ ranking is calculated by the Medical Information Density which reflects the amount of information the web site has about a given disease.

In this example of the University Source Category, the University of Maryland Medical Center has the highest Medical IQ of 12 for skin cancer reflecting that it had the highest number of references on skin cancers.

Mapping of Web Site Category and Disease Information IQ