Tailored retrieval of health information from the web for facilitating communication and empowerment of elderly people

A patient, nowadays, acquires health information from the Web mainly through a “human-to-machine” communication process with a generic search engine. This, in turn, affects, positively or negatively, his/her empowerment level and the “human-to-human” communication process that occurs between a patient and a healthcare professional such as a doctor. A generic communication process can be modelled by considering its syntactic-technical, semantic-meaning, and pragmatic-effectiveness levels and an efficacious communication occurs when all the communication levels are fully addressed. In the case of retrieval of health information from the Web, although a generic search engine is able to work at the syntactic-technical level, the semantic and pragmatic aspects are left to the user and this can be challenging, especially for elderly people. This work presents a custom search engine, FACILE, that works at the three communication levels and allows to overcome the challenges confronted during the search process. A patient can specify his/her information requirements in a simple way and FACILE will retrieve the “right” amount of Web content in a language that he/she can easily understand. This facilitates the comprehension of the found information and positively affects the empowerment process and communication with healthcare professionals

Linked Open Data in the world of education. A vision of the state of the art of this technology applied to teaching and learning

En el presente estudio hemos tratado de aportar una visión actual del mundo de los datos abiertos enlazados en el ámbito de la educación. Hemos revisado las aplicaciones que van dirigidas a implementar estas tecnologías en los repositorios de datos existentes. También se han revisado las aplicaciones de soporte a nuevos paradigmas dentro del mundo de la educación. Ha sido nuestro objetivo el estado del arte de la web semántica y las técnicas asociadas a esta, el lenguaje de ontologías y otros estándares. Finalmente, exploramos las áreas de investigación sobre datos abiertos enlazadas en el mundo de la educación.In this study, we have tried to provide a current vision of the world of linked open data in the field of education. We have reviewed the applications that are aimed at implementing these technologies in the existing data repositories. We also have reviewed the support of LOD to new paradigms within the world of education. Our objective has been the state of the art of the semantic web and the techniques associated with it, the language of ontologies and other standards. Finally, we explore the areas of research on open data linked in the world of education