Future studies
The next step in investigating the use of MeSH terms and their
future application in the Busca Saúde search portal would be to
identify any possibility that this descriptor may have for helping
to classify health-related web content into different categories.
One strategy for this approach would be to put forward a database
labeled into different categories and determine relevancy weights
for the MeSH terms. From this, it would be possible to investigate
different classification approaches, such as the use of characteristics
from other pages that are references through a web page (links,
for composing the vector of characteristics) [60] and even to include
some type of semantic analysis for classifying texts into different
categories [61,62]. Latent semantic analysis could also be
adapted for use through this approach [23].
The results presented and discussed in this study are especially
relevant in that they make it possible to apply MeSH to text indexation
and classification studies when the main focus is the internet
and the lay public. Moreover, this study also raises the possibility
that other studies could investigate the use of controlled vocabularies
as a basis for better mapping of the mutable non-deterministic
characteristics of the web.
For the future, and as stated in Section 4, it is also fundamentally
important to evaluate the effectiveness of Busca Saúde when it is