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Journal of Information Science
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Lay persons' and professionals' nutrition-related vocabularies and their matching to a general and a specific thesaurus

Tuula Poikonen

Department of Information Studies, University of Tampere, Finland

Pertti Vakkari

Department of Information Studies, University of Tampere, Finland, Pertti.Vakkari{at}uta.fi

This study examines the differences between expressions used by lay persons and professionals in nutrition-related questions and answers, and to what degree General Finnish Ontology (GFO) and a medical thesaurus (FinMeSH) cover these expressions. Fifty question—answer pairs were collected in an electronic answering service. Nutrition-related concepts and their expressions with their semantic relations were identified. The vocabularies of lay persons and professionals were found to be quite similar. This hints that a special consumer health vocabulary in the field of nutrition is not needed. GFO covered 32% of all expressions in questions and 37% of expressions in answers. FinMeSH covered 33% of expressions in both groups. The overlapping match of the thesauri was low, 25% in both questions and in answers. GFO and FinMeSH were found to be poor tools for supporting users in expressing nutrition-related information needs. GFO seemed not to form a covering bridge to FinMeSH.

Key Words: coverage • FinMeSH • matching lay persons • nutrition vocabulary • ontology • professionals • thesaurus

This version was published on April 1, 2009

Journal of Information Science, Vol. 35, No. 2, 232-243 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0165551508098602
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