Documents and Topic Maps: An Original way to Manage Medical Records

Medical records have been used for a long time with different forms, aims, and usages. This heterogeneity is the result of different professions, ways of working, and needs. It is but prejudicial to querying and sharing data and documents. Moreover, we consider that the system must be as close as possible to a more classical, noncomputerized way of working, such as paper-based medical record, and should thus manage documents. Medical records are often loosely or semistructured documents, impeding easy retrieval. In our approach, a medical record is considered as a set of documents and a set of data. In this article, we propose a software system useful for extracting data from loosely-structured documents coming from different sources and for querying them in a hybrid way. Querying can be done in a navigation space which represents extracted data or entire documents. Two main parts are described: the extraction of data in loosely-structured documents and the navigation in a unified view of documents and data.