Help on using the AIeHL

What is a resource?
A resource can be any item that is relevant to public health that can be shared.  It can be an event, a paper, a report, a table, data, a map, a website or even a contact.

What is metadata?
Metadata, "information about information", is the term used to describe the structured set of details which are attached to a knowledge resource in order to facilitate storage, access and usage.  Examples include a resource’s title, its creator or it subject.

What is PHL/SNOMED?
The Public Health Language/SNOMED (PHL/SNOMED) provides a common controlled set of terms to ensure consistency in describing public health data and activity. It was developed from the need to devise a single shared public health language suitable for the indexing and retrieval of public health resources.

It is the output of a collaborative project between the former Health Development Agency (HDA), whose work is taken forward by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the Association of Public Health Observatories (APHO).  The system consists of a hierarchical classification structure across ten main headings.

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What is introperability?
Interoperability is the capacity of a system to work with other systems without special effort on the part of a user. For example, searching through the information stores of a number of member websites from a single site requires those websites to be interoperable.  Interoperability is facilitated by the adoption of shared metadata standards. Once a resource has standard metadata attached to it in one system, it can be made available to all other systems which apply the same metadata standards and are interoperable with it.

Searching

Basic Search
In a Basic search the keywords entered are searched for in the title, description and subject metadata elements.  These three elements are combined and the search will return those  resources which have all words present in that combination. For example, if the keywords were "child" and "cancer", and "cancer" was found in the title and "child" found in the description of a resources, then that resource would be returned in the search results. 

The Basic Search brings back results from all member websites unless user restricts the search to a specific member in Advanced Search.

Search by PHL/SNOMED
All resources on the AIeHL have been tagged with PHL/SNOMED terms.  To select PHL/SNOMED terms from the hierarchical menu expand the ten top level terms by clicking the blue cross (+) and ticking the appropriate narrower terms.

When a PHL/SNOMED search is carried out, the search process will search for all the selected PHL terms amongst the PHL/SNOMED terms attached to each resource. For a resource to be returned, all PHL/SNOMED terms entered by the user must be included in the PHL/SNOMED terms attached to the resource.

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Advanced Search 
For the Advanced search you can use either Keyword search or PHL/SNOMED terms. The Advanced search further allows users to restrict their search to a particular creator, to all or any of the AIeHL member websites, to a particular type of resource or particular dates. When used with a Keyword search, the Advanced search can be used to restrict your search within the title, subject or description of a resource to allow you to search for all, exact, any or without keywords.  

Search results
The search results page lists the fields below for each resource returned.

All fields in the results page can be displayed in ascending or descending order by clicking on the name of that field.

To access a resource on the results page, click on the title of the selected resource.

Relevance: This indicates the % relevance of each resource in the results page to the search parameters entered.

Date: The date that appears in the ‘Date’ element of the resource.

Type: To display resources of a particular type, click on the drop down menu of the ‘show type’ icon, select the type and click on change.

Member: Indicates from which member website the resource is from.

Metadata:
To view the core metadata of a resource click Show.
To view the complete metadata click on the link on the core metadata page.
To leave the core metadata page click Hide.

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