A proposed semantic framework for diabetes education content management, customisation and delivery within the M2DM project

M2DM (multi access services for telematic management of diabetes mellitus, http://www. labmedinfo.org/research/m2dm/m2dm.htm) is an EU-funded telemedicine project that aims at increasing the quality of diabetes care by improving communication between patients and caregivers. As part of this project, we have undertaken the initial work of describing the necessary requirements (framework) of an advanced educational component for M2DM in accordance with the latest Semantic Web concepts. This paper describes our proposed semantic framework for educational content management, customisation and delivery. A big internet challenge today is to find and push situation and user-specific quality knowledge to users based on their actual individual needs, circumstances and profiles at any given time. We believe that the semantic framework presented in this paper could be a good step towards meeting this challenge. Benefits for users, both developers and end users, of adopting such framework are also discussed. The ideas discussed in this paper could be easily adapted to other similar services besides M2DM and to different health topics besides diabetes mellitus. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.