Complementary and alternative therapies and medicines (CAM) such as acupuncture or mistletoe treatment are much asked for by cancer patients. With a growing interest in such therapies, physicians need a simple tool with which to get an overview of the scientific publications on CAM, particularly those that are not listed in common bibliographic databases like MEDLINE. CAMbase is an XML-based bibliographical database on CAM which serves to address this need. A custom front end search engine performs semantic analysis of textual input enabling users to quickly find information relevant to the search queries. This article describes the technical background and the architecture behind CAMbase, a free online database on CAM (www.cambase.de). We give examples on its use, describe the underlying algorithms and present recent statistics for search terms related to complementary therapies in oncology.
Keywords: cancer; complementary medicine; database; literature; semantic web.