The SHARED “SHARingPoint” and the “Knowledge Guide”

To bridge the information gap, SHARED Network - Scientists for Health and Research for Development, focuses its activity on two complementary dimensions. First, by joining the global endeavor to promote equity of access to developing countries, and second by promoting capacity building at the country level to organize local information sources and establish local information flows.
The first step toward this SHARED knowledge pathway is to ensure that the information obtained at a local level is adequately structured and that it finds its way through the multiple connections and nodes, allowing easy retrieval and local knowledge management. SHARED has developed a platform for managing information, the DIPE - Directory of Institutions, Projects and Specialists, making it easier for the institutions to recover information on what they are doing and who is doing what. It is oriented to small and medium sized institutions, works online a nd offline and can be installed in Local Area Networks.
An information node in SHARED is at the same time receptor and provider in the information flow and every single node has the possibility to activate as many connections as required to produce the desired output. The system is based on advanced Web technology that automatically indexes full text in multiple languages, from different decentralized data sources, resulting in a language independent list of weighted keywords – the Conceptual Fingerprint. To find out Who is doing What and Where in health research, it is only necessary to write a text of interest (or copy/paste) at the SHARingpoint site (www.sharingpoint.net). The best matches for projects, peer reviewed articles and/or abstracts, as well as health news and mailing lists will be presented in the original language whilst the profile of the search and of the documents found - the CFPs - will always be presented in the language initially used for the search, which is automatically recognized. Once the document of interest has been found, the user can link out to the original source.
Because it is at the National level that data becomes useful information to support the decision-making process and can modify the country’s health performance, the access to international validated health information sources such as guidelines, peer review literature and ongoing research projects will only help to improve health systems if combined or adapted to the particularities of the registered and published information of the local level. SHARED strengthen knowledge networks that support decision-making and health policy formulation in the countries, helping to bridge the giant gap between what is known about effective health interventions and what is actually used in health decision and policy-making.
The “Knowledge Guide”, an extension of the SHARingpoint, helps to create a focused and compressed view of the desired information by extracting sub sets (e.g. a Country or Disease) from existing pools of fingerprints of any data source of the SHARED network. This tool synthesizes the existing knowledge, cleans up and harmonize data on experts and institutions, and summarizes evidence from literature. It allows an overview of what is going on in a vertical (e.g. Kenya or Ebola), whilst linking to experts and active institutions (publishing or researching) of the particular country. Tendencies of growing interest in a particular field can also be early identified by including trend-mining facilities on the so accumulated fingerprints, helping to increase the ability of local knowledge management.