Advances in Website Information Resources to Aid in Clinical Practice Matthew J. Rioth, MD, Travis J. Osterman, DO, and Jeremy L. Warner, MD, MS OVERVIEW The World Wide Web, which has been widely implemented for roughly two decades, is humankind’s most impressive effort to aggregate and organize knowledge to date. The medical community was slower to embrace the Internet than others, but the majority of clinicians now use it as part of their everyday practice. For the practicing oncologist, there is a daunting quantity of information to master. For example, a new article relating to cancer is added to the MEDLINE database approximately every 3 minutes. Fortunately, Internet resources can help organize the deluge of information into useful knowledge. This manuscript provides an overview of resources related to general medicine, oncology, and social media that will be of practical use to the practicing oncologist. It is clear from the vast size of the Internet that we are all life-long learners, and the challenge is to acquire “just-in-time” information so that we can provide the best possible care to our patients. The resources that we have presented in this article should help the practicing oncologist continue along the path of transforming information to knowledge to wisdom. T he World Wide Web, proposed by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau on November 12, 1990, and widely implemented since 1994, is humankind’s most impressive effort to aggregate and organize knowledge to date (Fig. 1). 1 Although the total number of Internet sites is con- stantly changing, a recent survey estimated that there are 876,812,666 sites with a total information content of 5-million terabytes of data. 2 The medical community was slower to embrace the Internet than others but has now caught up. The current generation of medical students may not recall a world before the Web, mobile telephony, and cheap computing power. 3 As an example of the Web’s pervasiveness, a 2009 study found that a majority of junior physicians were using Google (80%) or Wikipedia (70%) in their daily clinical practice. 4 BACKGROUND: THE ORGANIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE At its core, the Internet operates by organizing knowledge, both intentionally and informally. There are many useful paradigms for understanding knowledge organization (e.g., explicit versus tacit; individual versus organizational; novel versus learned). The Internet could be framed in any of these dimensions, but for our purposes the data, information, knowledge, wisdom (DIKW) framework, which was intro- duced in a rudimentary form as early as 1955, offers a very useful starting point. 5,6 This schema is usually represented by a pyramid, where the foundation is raw data. For the Inter- net, this might be an Internet Protocol (IP) address (e.g., 23.21.100.117) or the American Standard Code for Informa- tion Interchange codes representing individual characters on a webpage. The next level in the pyramid is information, which introduces basic meaning to data, such as “what,” “where,” and “how much.” For example, the IP address 23.21.100.117 points to the uniform resource locator (URL) www.cancer.net. Knowledge is the introduction of context and content to information. This is sometimes referred to as “know-how” and is the core goal of many Internet-based re- sources, which are often referred to as knowledge bases (this term is formally used to refer to a machine-readable knowl- edge resource but in practical terms is used more broadly). Finally, wisdom is the most diffıcult part of this schema to describe, as there is some disagreement on what exactly wis- dom represents and whether it can only be manifest as a hu- man endeavor, as opposed to a collective experience such as the Internet. 7 For the practicing oncologist, the Internet resources most useful in day-to-day practice will have some overlap across the DIKW framework but will be primarily in the knowledge sphere. As described below, the sheer volume of information related to cancer is impossible to master, yet most practitio- ners desire to have the fınal say in their practice of medicine (i.e., the application of wisdom to knowledge). We now turn to an overview of some of the current resources available to the practicing oncologist, in three parts: (1) general medical knowledge bases; (2) oncology-specifıc resources; (3) social From the Division of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN; Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. Disclosures of potential conflicts of interest are found at the end of this article. Corresponding author: Jeremy L. Warner, 2220 Pierce Ave., Preston Research Building 777, Nashville, TN 37232; email: jeremy.warner@vanderbilt.edu. © 2015 by American Society of Clinical Oncology. RIOTH, OSTERMAN, AND WARNER e608 2015 ASCO EDUCATIONAL BOOK | asco.org/edbook