The Editor in Chief of Cancer Informatics recently issued a call for papers.

What is the primary focus of your research?

I am working at the Center of Integrative Medicine at Witten/Herdecke University with two main topics:

• The development and application of methods for Health Services Research
• The use of modern web-technology for the creation of databases like CAMbase (www.cambase.de) or Arthedata (www.arthedata.de) Both topics serve to strenghten the Evidence-base of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)

What are the most exciting developments arising from current research in your area?

It is fascinating to see how things develop in the field of web technology. Almost 10 years ago we started our CAMbase project, a database on CAM and were faced with problems like server response times, speed of internet access and so on, which nowadays do not play that role anymore. Additionally new semantic web standards like XML have been developed and is quite amazing to see the new possibilities alongside this innovations.

This has influenced our work dramatically and were are now capable to develop database features like "tag clouds" which were impossible 10 years ago.

Who are your main collaborators? Please describe your work with them.

There is of course my team Christa Raak and Hartmut Zillmann with with whom I have been working for the past years. Our main collaborators are the Institutes for Art Therapy Research at the Universities in Nuertingen and Ottersberg (both in Germany). They had the idea of developing a bibliographical database on Art Therapy. As a mathematician working in medicine I am trying to identify the needs of our partners and "translate" them into technical terms (i.e. database structures) which then are realized by Hartmut. Normally this process quickly converges towards a fixed state.

Anther important and much younger collaboration is given with the ICCR-project. ICCR is a international collaboration of national and/or government-funded online complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) information providers which tries to map the landscape of Internet resources on CAM, develop guidelines on aspects of CAM information provision and bring togehter the main actors of this field. CAMbase was one of the centers that initiated the start-up of the ICCR in 2007 and we are meeting on a regular basis to discuss new information trends particularly with respect to patient information.

How did you come to be working in your research area?

After finishing my PhD on speech recognition in 1998 at my university I was looking for a academic position within the limits of mathematics and medicine. At that time the German government-funded project "Unconventional Medical Approaches (German acronym: UMR) was searching for a methodologist for health services research in CAM and I was quite impressed about the possibilities and ideas within that field. One of the tasks was to bring a database of self-collected bibliographical metadata online. That was the start of CAMbase and after a prototype was finished we made an application the the German Research Council (DFG) which was voted positive. From that point new projects (and also new funders like the Software AG Foundation) came in and this is how it all began.

What do you think about the development of open access publishing?

When we developed CAMbase one of our internal rules was that bibliographical information should be free and accessable for everyone without registration fees. I remember that not all of our contacts at that time agreed on that but that was our idea behind CAMbase. At that time (I suppose it was in 2000) the first Open access publishers started and we thought that this is in congruence with our ideas. From a personal point of view I like the idea that full-texts of my research are available through MEDLINE with only one or two mouse-clicks.

What articles and/or books have you published recently?

Recently I have published several articles with my colleague Elke Jeschke about prescribing patterns in a network of CAM-physicians, i.e.

Jeschke E, Ostermann T, Vollmar HC, Kroz M, Bockelbrink A, Witt CM, Willich SN, Matthes H. Evaluation of prescribing patterns in a German network of CAM physicians for the treatment of patients with hypertension: a prospective observational study. BMC Fam Pract.; 10(1):78.

Another quite recent article deals with "Knowledge transfer for the management of dementia: a cluster randomised trial of blended learning in general practice" where I am a co-author.

The last article I would like to mention is a methjodological paper on "Regression toward the mean--a detection method for unknown population mean based on Mee and Chua's algorithm." published with my colleague Rainer Lüdtke in BMC Med Res Methodol. 2008;8:52.

Further information:

• CAMbase
• Arthedata
• ICCR
• University of Witten/Herdecke