Seal of transparency heritage in the CISMeF quality-controlled health gateway

BACKGROUND: It is an absolute necessity to continually assess the quality of health information on the Internet. Quality-controlled subject gateways are Internet services which apply a selected set of targeted measures to support systematic resource discovery. METHODS: The CISMeF health gateway became a contributor to the MedCIRCLE project to evaluate 270 health information providers. The transparency heritage consists of using the evaluation performed on providers that are referenced in the CISMeF catalogue for evaluating the documents they publish, thus passing on the transparency label from the publishers to their documents. RESULTS: Each site rated in CISMeF has a record in the CISMeF database that generates an RDF into HTML file. The search tool Doc'CISMeF displays information originating from every publisher evaluated with a specific MedCIRCLE button, which is linked to the MedCIRCLE central repository. Starting with 270 websites, this trust heritage has led to 6,480 evaluated resources in CISMeF (49.8% of the 13,012 resources included in CISMeF). CONCLUSION: With the MedCIRCLE project and transparency heritage, CISMeF became an explicit third party.