The broad adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the e-health domain has led to the emergence of the term “Medicine 2.0” for relevant applications, services and tools. Web 2.0 applications have contributed towards bringing geographically dispersed groups of people with common interests together. Nevertheless, language remains an essential barrier. People with a wealth of knowledge to share, and willingness to participate, cannot become members of an online community unless they master the official language of the community and of the software platform that supports it. This is a great impediment to the effective dissemination of valuable knowledge among dispersed medical communities, particularly those interested in topics where information is very scarce, such as rare diseases.
The MORMED project attempts to address this challenge by developing a multilingual social networking and content management platform. The platform will combine the semantically-enhanced social networking and content management facilities of the OrganiK platform with technologies enabling machine translation and post-editing by human experts to make content available in multiple languages. MORMED will be piloted in a community interested in Lupus or Antiphospholipid Syndrome, involving researchers, medical doctors, general practitioners, patients and support groups.
