HealthMash Helps Sort Through Online Health Morass

HealthMash is a new knowledge base that bills its mission as promoting health and well-being by providing relevant information of high quality from trusted health sources on the Web, using sophisticated Web 2.0 universal search and discovery technology with Semantic Web Concepts.

Semanticweb.com recently conducted an e-mail interview with Endre Jofoldi, CEO of Budapest, Hungary-based WebLib -- the developer of knowledge bases and specialized, natural-language processing and search technologies that created HealthMash. WebLib provides natural-language processing tools and semantic engineering services to international clients in the U.S. and Europe, and some of its employees also work as individual contractors for the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Its customers include government agencies, universities, and major content providers in the U.S. WebFeat.org, the federated search engine vendor, licensed our clustering technology.

Its technologies, which include its English, medical and, web spellchecker PolySpell, and its clustering engine PolyCluster (available for licensing as separate products), are showcased in PolyMeta.com and the AllPlus.com universal meta-search and discovery engine.

Semanticweb.com: What was the impetus for creating HealthMash?

Jofoldi: It was our personal experience with how difficult it is to find relevant health information of high quality from trusted sources on the Web. In addition, we have been aware of the increasing popularity and importance of consumers looking for health info on the Internet. Fortunately, we have considerable professional expertise in health information retrieval and knowledge bases, so we felt motivated to do something new and useful in this area.

Semanticweb.com: What is your vision for this offering -- why, for instance, do you foresee it as more useful/better/differentiated from something like WebMD or other sources of health information?

Jofoldi: There are a lot of good sources of health information on the Web, including WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and Medlineplus, to mention a few. There are even more questionable and/or outright dangerous sources of information, and often the major search engines mix the good and the bad data in their search results. When it comes to one’s health, “second opinions” are very important not only when consulting with doctors, but also in accessing multiple sources of reliable information. By combining a focus on quality information sources with a comprehensive semantic health knowledge base and Web 2.0/Web 3.0 universal meta-search and discovery, we hope to make the best unbiased and personally relevant health information available to people.