Metadata design for Chinese medicine digital library using XML

The development of Chinese medicine has been growing rapidly and is beginning to draw significant attention globally. In Hong Kong in particular, the government has targeted Chinese medicine as one of its major future developments. A system for registering Chinese medical practitioners is being set up and a Chinese medicine port for medical manufacturing and research is being investigated. Although it has drawn significant attention, information about Chinese medicine is not yet widely available on the Internet, and searching for such information is extremely difficult. In this paper, we present an XML metadata design for Chinese medicine. The system encompasses a register server, information servers, a search engine and client programs that have been developed to browse and search the XML documents that are available in distributed Chinese medicine digital libraries.