DOCAMPUS

Germany has one of the best healthcare systems in the world consisting of highly trained doctors. Continuous education is a must for doctors and there is a large variety of continuing education events offered. But where can doctors find the continuing education event that they would like to attend? With the simple to use search function of the DOCAMPUS platform, doctors will soon be able to research and find relevant continuing medical educational events being offered in Germany. By the order of the German Society for Continuing Medical Education (DGÄF), Fraunhofer FOKUS is developing the technical basis for the DOCAMPUS Portal.

In DOCAMPUS practically every continuing medical educational event available is stored. This adds up to around 30,000 events. With the help of a new Web Crawling technology developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS in the MashWeb project (Data Extraction and Integration Platform), information on continuing medical educational events dispersed throughout the Internet is sought, found and saved.

As depicted in the figure above, for the DOCAMPUS platform, the data is intelligently processed and then indexed with keywords derived from a medical Thesaurus. The processed data is then made available to doctors at www.docampus.de. In a customised Content Management System on an open source basis, relevant information such as studies, interviews, medical products and new medical treatments can be accessed using the DOCAMPUS platform.

Additionally a Recommender system developed by Fraunhofer FOKUS is used to match this content to the entered search term and the accordingly selected continuing medical education event. Thus the users are served with customized information complementing their search and medical specialisation.