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The lack of interoperability between repositories of heterogeneous and geographically widespread data is an obstacle to the diffusion, sharing and reutilization of those data. We present the development of an open repositories network taking into account both the syntactic and semantic interoperability of the different repositories and based on international standards in this field. The network is used by the medical community in France for the diffusion and sharing of digital teaching resources. The syntactic interoperability of the repositories is managed using the OAI-PMH protocol for the exchange of metadata describing the resources. Semantic interoperability is based, on one hand, on the LOM standard for the description of resources and on MESH for the indexing of the latter and, on the other hand, on semantic interoperability management designed to optimize compliance with standards and the quality of the metadata.

One of the main aims of learning platforms is to guide students towards interaction with learning activities. Pedagogically, these activities should be connected and well-integrated in a coherent environment. Faced with the increasing demand of medical school faculty and for online delivery of course materials, we designed an integrated and generic lesson model. This was implemented in an original virtual-learning environment. The platform was programmed within an object-oriented content management system embedding a workflow engine. This paper provides a description of the lesson model and the comparative evaluation of its usage by students of two medical curricula. Web usage mining techniques were applied to identify navigation patterns. The monitoring of student behavior in terms of usage is discussed to help student follow-up and optimize tutoring arrangements.

Objectives: to design and implement mediators dedicated to access heterogeneous information sources in a homogeneous way., Method: processes translate a query into the syntax of a target source built thanks to the UMLS knowledge sources and a catalog of information sources. Communication services connect users with information sources at the point they deliver results., Results: examples show the benefits healthcare professionals may found in searching information in this way., Discussion: improvements on the current developments may be done according to the current architecture of ARIANE. Specially, the user interface should be easier to use than the present one.

This paper is the description of a French Virtual Medical University based on the federation of existing or currently being developed resources in several Medical Schools in France. The objectives of the project is not only to share experiences across the country but also to integrate several resources using the New Information and Communication Technologies to support new pedagogical approaches for medical students and also for continuing medical education. The project includes: A virtual Medical Campus using secure access from several sites, The Integration of new interactive resources based on pedagogical methods, Implementation of new indexing and search engines based on medical vocabularies and ontologies, The definition of general and specific portals, the evaluation of the system for ergonomics and contents.

Objectives: To design and implement mediators dedicated to access various kinds of information sources in the framework of the project ARIANE., Method: Mediators are dynamically built thanks to three components: pieces of knowledge issued from the UMLS knowledge sources and from a catalog of information sources, processes that translate a query into the syntax of a target source, and communication services provided by operating systems., Results: A scenario details the complete mediation process with an indexed web site., Conclusion: This approach mixes knowledge and software engineering. It benefits from services provided by operating systems and allows scalability and reusability of software components.

The basis of conceptual graphs theory is an ontology of types of concepts. Concepts issued from the ontology are interlinked by semantic relationships and constitute canonical conceptual graphs. Canonical graphs may be combined to derive new conceptual graphs by means of formation rules. This formalism allows to separate knowledge representation into a conceptual level and a domain-dependent level, and enables to share and reuse a representation. This paper presents conceptual graph applications to biomedical data and concept representation, classification systems, information retrieval, and natural language understanding and processing. A discussion on the unifying role conceptual graphs theory plays in the implementation of knowledge-based systems is also presented.

Hypertext and hypermedia are used to access loosely structured information. The lack of conceptual model for hypertext application makes it difficult to represent the mental model of the author. Users are often lost in the information and the objective of the author is not achieved. In this paper, we describe an approach to handle information and knowledge in the FORUM hypermedia authoring system. It allows the author to create and maintain the hypertext more easily and facilitates the navigation of the reader. An application for learning uterine magnetic resonance imaging is also presented.

As information databases we consider all the kinds of information repositories that are handled by computer systems. When querying very large information databases, the end-users are often faced with the problem to parse their questions efficiently into the query languages of the computer systems. Conceptual graphs were initially designed for natural language analysis and understanding. Due to their closeness to semantic networks, their expressiveness is powerful enough to be applied to knowledge representation and use by computer systems. This work demonstrates that conceptual graphs are a suitable means to model both the information in patient databases and the queries to these databases, and that operations on graphs can compute the pattern matching process needed to provide the answers. A prototype that exploits this model is presented. Experiments have been made with the material furnished by the Unified Medical Language System project (version 2, 1992) of the National Library of Medicine, USA.