Fonctionality

Spell checking automatically corrects spelling errors made while entering medical terms in search queries. These specialized, infrequently used terms are the source of many common errors.

The programs underlying WRAPIN are largely language independent, which means that only the interface need be translated into any desired language.

Identification of the most appropriate keywords in a document is the first, and most important step in the production of relevant results. The main source of keywords is the MeSH vocabulary. All other modules of the WRAPIN system depend on this all-important function.

Two characteristics of the UMLS are utilised in WRAPIN: the superior lexical coverage compared with MeSH, and cooccurrences, which improves the selection of keywords.

When there are several referenced databases to choose from it is important to choose only that/those most relevant to the query. A selection module categorises data sources based either on the frequency of terms occuring in the database (when the source is available) or according to the MeSH hierarchy (in the case of remote databases) in order to find the most appropriate resources for each query.

Some of the remote data sources make use of boolean logic. A module has been designed to query these sources and extract the useful essence, to mitigate the limitations of this type of system.

This module chooses the best documents retrieved by WRAPIN and sorts them in order of decreasing relevance. The comparison of each document with the query takes place at this stage.

The goal is to identify the conclusion within the text of each of the best documents retrieved by WRAPIN. The conclusion is presented as the document summary on the results page.