Linking Tacit Knowledge in the Pediatric Pain e-Mail Archives and Explicit Knowledge in PubMed

The goal of this research is to provide a means by which the tacit knowledge in an e-mail archive can be browsed in an organized manner and linked directly to the explicit knowledge found in PubMed. The Pediatric Pain Mailing List (PPML) is an international Internet-based forum for informal discussion of any topic related to pain in children. There are now over seven hundred members, including clinicians, researchers and patients from at least forty countries on six continents. Currently, the archive contains more than ten thousand messages. This paper reports on SOM-based approaches to the taci-knowledge organization and an MMTx-based approach that links the e-mail threads directly into the MeSH hierarchy and links to PubMed.