More and more people are looking for information on health topics on the Internet. There they find a vast of information. However, it is often unclear how up-to-date and complete they are – even information from high quality sources. The author of the information is also often unknown. Non-experts are therefore unable to assess the quality of health information on the Internet. What is missing is a „place of truth“ for health information.

The creation and management of this „place of truth“ would be far too time-consuming and expensive with conventional editorial processes. Editors would have to identify reliable sources of health information, systematically collect and evaluate it and finally make it available in a suitable, homogeneous, target group-oriented form.

A digital system with a high degree of automation, on the other hand, could significantly reduce the effort involved. It would therefore have to be a system that learns health information from digital, unstructured sources, evaluates it and makes it available in a suitable form. We see the learning process as a major obstacle to this system.

We see the learning process as a major obstacle to the above-mentioned system. Therefore, this challenge is to find a way to learn, memorise and keep up-to-date health information from unstructured sources with no or little human support.

https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/fileadmin/files/BSt/Publikationen/GrauePublikationen/VV_Studie_Das-Internet-auch-Ihr-Ratgeber_Befragung.pdf