Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Swine flu has been sweeping the nation – or at least the news media. Some of the most recent reports put 22 million Americans as having suffered through H1N1, with 3,900 of them having died as a result of swine-flu related causes.

With flu season already underway—and with peak flu season just around the corner in January—Semanticweb.com thought we’d explore how some of the new health sites that leverage semantic web concepts are helping their users manage through the tough times. Below we present three.

HealthMash

The interface provides a very clean look with easily understood tabbed access to the multiple ways you might want to find information about the bug: Trusted health information, recent news, video, images, and blogs – not to mention drugs and substances, clinical trials and integrative medicine for the alternative slant. One of the core principles of the service was to use quality information sources in combination with its semantic health knowledge base, and it appears to be more or less keeping to that idea of mashing information from reputable sites. Its blog recommendations may seem a bit limited for exploring the swine flu, but at least those in search of serious health information won’t be directed to the ho-ho-ho one about Santa facing swine flu concerns.

The service makes the expected semantic connection that swine flu and H1N1 virus are related concepts. It’s a bit unclear why—considering the trusted content focus—one of the YouTube videos that pops up as a link for the H1N1 search is from one Sister Sunnshine, lambasting research around a microchip for diagnosing viruses. Most of the other videos in that group draw primarily from the established network TV and cable source videos posted on YouTube. Some of the Twitter connections that pop up seem a bit questionable too. Then again, the service is still in beta.

But we do like the way you can narrow down by topics the specific results in a tabbed category. From the 82 swine flu Books results, for instance, you can narrow right down to the 25 that are tagged as discussing to one degree or another the causes of the disease, and even make your way to the Google Books page view of the two works that discuss it in the context of Legionnaires’ disease.

(Also see HealthMash Helps Sort Through Online Health Morass)

HealthLine

HealthLine has a nice setup for finding out what your symptoms might add up to. Type in “high temperature” as a symptom at this site, and it’s smart enough to know you mean fever and offer you close to 200 possible causes. Add that you’re throwing up as a symptom, and that knocks the common cold off the list. Type in “hard time breathing” and choose “difficulty breathing” from the pop-up list of synonyms, and now plain old flu and swine flu are right at the top of the list.

The terminology database taxonomy of over one million medical terms and consumer-friendly synonyms to draw from seems pretty on target (heart attack – myocardial infarction, for instance). Back to the flu, assuming you’re not too sick to watch, you can pull up some 3D videos on the subject or find yourself a doctor specializing in the area. That may be a more useful feature for specific conditions, though – rheumatoid arthritis, for instance, will get you a list of rheumatologists and affiliated specialists such as orthopedists, as well, for instance.

One of the parts of the site with the most potential is its HealthMaps. The Influenze HealthMap, for instance, lets users mouse over topics from tests to flu forecast to CDC and link to relevant content on and off the site. That’s part of the whole concept of the semantic web where you needn’t search specifically for what it is you know you want to know – rather just discover as you go, things that perhaps you didn’t know and didn’t even know you wanted to know. As it happens, some health maps, including this one, seem a little imcomplete compared to some others on the site, such as the much richer one for breast cancer.

HealthLinks is another one of the neat features for moving from search to discovery – the site uses its semantic taxonomy to automatically create hyperlinks from any health concept to other relevant health concepts, so an article on the flu, for instance, might also lead you to learning more about ear infections. Whoda thunk?

(Also see Explaining the Semantic Web)

Medline.Cognition, which developed as an example of Cognition's natural language processing technology, remains a more straightforward implementation of the semantic web in action. The site doesn’t have the bells and whistles of the other two, but it gets the job done for swine flu searchers, and others with health questions on their mind.

Ask it how likely you are to die from swine flu, for instance, and right near the top is a link to information telling you that you are more likely to be hospitalized or meet your maker if you have predisposing risk factors. A box on the side of the screen shows you which word meanings were selected in the query, and you can expand your queries to include search concepts found anywhere in the document, require all search terms to match, and note how you want to see results – for example, results where all search terms appear in the same order as they were in the query, followed by results where the terms are closer together.

Google’s actually getting better at answering some of the same questions we tried with Medline, but the latter should have the edge for more complex conditions where plain English queries might otherwise lead to an explosion of false positive content returns, thanks to the ambiguity of some of the documents and potentially less finesse at disambiguating word senses and ontological relations between word meanings.

(Also see Cognition's Free Service Cuts Through Health Info Clutter)