Background: Quality-controlled subject gateways are Internet services which apply a selected set of targeted measures to support systematic resource discovery. Considerable manual effort is used to process a selection of resources which meet quality criteria and to display a extensive description and indexing of these resources with standards-based metadata.Objective: Several metadata element sets are proposed to describe, index and qualify health resources to be included in a French quality-controlled health gateway called CISMeF. The main objectives were to enhance Internet health document retrieval and navigation, and to allow interoperability with other Internet services. Results: The Dublin Core metadata element set is used to describe and index all Internet health resources included in CISMeF. For teaching resources, some elements from IEEE1484 Learning Object Metadata are also used For evidenced-base medicine resources, specific metadata are employed which assess the health content quality. The HIDDEL metadata set is used to enhance transparency, trust and quality of health information on the Internet. Conclusion: Comprehensive metadata element sets can be extremely useful to describe, index and assess health resources on the Internet in a quality-controlled subject gateway. Machine-readable metadata creates an Semantic Web which is more efficient for end-users as compared to the current Web.