The PROPHET system was an early medical
expert system
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system emulating the decision-making ability of a human expert.
Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning through bodies of knowledge, represented mainly as if†...
.
The system was initiated in about 1965 by a young administrator at
NIH,
William Raub, who had the idea to set up a collaborative communication network modeled on
ARPANET, for use among biomedical investigators to share data and procedures, with a wide range of computational tools, ranging from statistics to molecular orbit calculations.
A panel of NIH advisors planned the system over a couple of years, until Bolt, Beranek and Neman (
BBN Technologies) received the contract for implementation.
The PROPHET system was operational for 15 to 20 years before being superseded by more current
Internet tools.
According to NIH, "PROPHET is the most nearly comprehensive set of information-handling tools for this area of science ever to be presented in a unified system, and offered as a service to the biomedical community."
Further reading
*
*
*
*
* Castleman, P. A., et al. "The implementation of the PROPHET system." Proceedings of the May 6–10, 1974, national computer conference and exposition. ACM, 1974.
* Ransil, Bernard J. "Applications of the PROPHET system in human clinical investigation." Proceedings of the May 6–10, 1974, national computer conference and exposition. ACM, 1974.
* Rohrer, Douglas C., et al. "Functional receptor mapping for modified cardenolides: Use of the PROPHET system." 1979. 259–279.
* Weeks, Charles M., et al. "Applications of the PROPHET system in correlating crystallographic structural data with biological information." Proceedings of the May 6–10, 1974, national computer conference and exposition. ACM, 1974.
Archival materials
The
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...
holds materials related to PROPHET, including two brochures about "Prophet, a National Computing Resource for Life Science Research" from
BBN and a BBN Prophet II Design Manual.
BBN Prophet II Design Manual
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Prophet System
Expert systems