Representing Nursing Knowledge: Applications for Database Design

With the integration of health information available on the World Wide Web (WWW) in clinical practice, information management becomes more important than ever before. Although an on-line system could provide nurses with timely and convenient access to health information for discharge teaching, most nurses still rely on traditional practices such as written discharge notes and brochures. Nurses find the volume of information on the WWW overwhelming, the task of sorting out irrelevant and inaccurate information too difficult, and the time to search for information too long.

Professional use of these resources requires an alternative organization, such as data repositories (i.e. electronic databases.) These are organized collections of information resources with indexes that support precise and sensitive retrieval. The paper reflects on consideration that organizing and indexing of on-line health information resources for professional use has a pragmatic facet: meet actual and future needs and requests for information. Hence, an information resource should not only be analyzed in and of itself, but should also be analyzed from the point of view of what questions it may or may not answer in the future. To search effectively, both indexers and searchers must understand the language used to represent the documents. The concepts that nurses most likely will use to seek information are domain-specific and reflect their practice. Several nursing knowledge representation systems or terminology models sexist but the question arises as to whether their understanding and use makes them adequate representations for consistently effective searches. The paper also reports on the results of indexing Web Pages using a medical (including nursing) controlled vocabulary (MeSH).