• Happy New Year 2010
• Results of the survey on the certification process
• Results Web2.0 survey
• New generation of search engine: HON's question answering tool
• Conferences

The HON foundation wishes you a happy new year 2010. She thanks you for being present one year more at her side.

HON accreditation renewed for 2010

HON successfully passed the annual inspection by a neutral and qualified organization according to norms such as EN45011/ISO65, thus acknowledging the quality of the certification work of health related websites.

For this new year, HON is pleased to announce her recent integration of the Corporate Institutional Members of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).

Your opinion is important for us. The survey concerning your satisfaction of the HONcode certification process is conducted one month and one year after obtaining the HONcode certification. The results are very encouraging for HON. Indeed, in majority you are very satisfied with the deadline for the reviewing of the site, with the quality of exchanges, the availability of the HON staff and finally with the relevance of recommendations. In addition 97% among you agree that the certification is worthy of the effort. Details of the survey results.

In March 2009, we sent you a survey dealing with the collaborative aspects of your website.
In the survey conducted from January 26, 2009 to March 27, 2009, amongst webmasters of sites certified in France, we asked among others, the following questions:

• Do they themselves have a collaborative platform?
• What do they think of establishing rules for these platforms?
• What is their opinion of those proposed by HON?

We received 140 answers to the French form from 1166 which were sent and 59 replies to the questionnaire in English out of 4531 which were sent. So, a total of 199 responses from Webmasters.
This survey has hightlighted that nearly 1 in 2 webmasters have already integrated a collaborative plateform in their site with 64% of forum and 42% of blog.
Then, 86% of respondents think it is important that users become aware of the charter before using their platform and 88% find it necessary to establish specific rules for collaborative platforms. Thus, there is an awareness among the webmasters, of the impact of such tools on the Internet (More information).

The number of documents for a given request is constantly increasing, but the search for information for the lay person has not changed at all! While some rely on the advent of the Semantic Web to generate new intelligent search engines, others hope to facilitate the interaction with search engines by providing question answering (QA) systems. These are based mainly on heuristics and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and the use of redundancy of information.

The goal of such systems is to provide relevant answers to a question in natural language. Thus the user directly accesses the information required and does not have to go through all the documents proposed by the search engine.

You can test the HON's Quesiton/Answering system!

HON contributes to the following conferences:

MedInfo 2010 September 12 to September 15, 2010, Cape Town, South Africa. This is the 13th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics.

The Health Executive Summit convenes more than 900 European health leaders over 3 days to share visionary strategies, innovative programmes and latest best practices.
This conference takes place in Paris, France from 19 to 21 May 2010.

High Level eHealth Conference 2010. HON members receive the World of Health IT Member rate of €499,-!! Important: When registering, please make sure to select the name of Health On the Net Foundation (HON) from the Partner/Organisation Committee drop down list on page 1 of registration. register now