Building a knowledge base to support a digital library

As part of an effort to support searching of online medical literature according to individual needs, we have studied the possibility of using the co-occurrence of MeSH terms in MEDLINE citations to automate construction of a knowledge base of interrelated concepts. This study evaluates the relevance of the relationships between the semantic pairs generated by the extraction algorithm, and the clinical validity of the semantic types involved in the process. From the semantic pairs proposed by our method, a group of clinicians judged sixty percent to be relevant. The remaining forty percent were considered unimportant by clinicians, We believe our knowledge extraction method is appropriate for the task of retrieving information from the medical record in order to guide users during a search and retrieval process. Future directions include the validation of the knowledge, based on an evaluation of system performance.