After posting the blog about the Tag Cloud of Clinical Uncertainty (TCoCU) I received a comment asking to explain how to read the page. So, here is an explanation of what the page represents and how to use it.

  • Tags are keywords that help describe a piece of information, in this case a clinical Q&A. A typical Q&A will have 3-7 associated tags (or keywords). You can see these tags underneath a particular question.
  • A tag cloud is visual representation of these tags. They are listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. The more prominent a single tag appears the more times this tag appears within the collection. Looking at the TCoCU shows that terms such as Cardiovascular disease, Women’s health and Musculoskeletal disease are prominent. This shows that there are lots of questions with uncertain answers in these areas.
  • The tag cloud on the homepage aggregates all the tags in the system. However, if you do a search, the resultant tag cloud only shows tags associated with the returned search results.
  • If you click on a single tag in the TCoCU this takes you to a new page, with two main areas. Firstly, there is a list of Q&As. These are all Q&As with the tag you had clicked in the TCoCU. Secondly, there is another tag cloud. When you initially clicked on a tag in the TCoCU you created a subset of Q&As and this new tag cloud is an aggregate of the tags for that subset only.

To try and make better sense of all the above go and try the following, go and click on the diabetes tab in the TCoCU. At the time of writing this shows a list of 47 Q&As which relate to diabetes that have highly uncertain answers. The tag cloud to the right of the page shows a different list of tags from the TCoCU as the new tag cloud only shows the aggregated tags from the 47 Q&As.

I hope the above helps, if not leave a comment and I’ll try and clarify further.