PROPHET system

The PROPHET system was an early medical expert system.

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The PROPHET system was operational for 15 to 20 years before being superseded by more current Internet tools.

References

Further reading

• Silvio Garattini (1975). Advances in Pharmacology and Chemotherapy. Academic Press. pp. 82–83. ISBN 0120329158. 
• Division of Research Resources, Beranek Bolt, and Newman inc (1982). PROPHET User's Manual: A User's Manual for the PROPHET System. National Institutes of Health. 
• William F. Raub (1977). "Drug Information Retrieval Systems". In Jack Belzer, Albert G. Holzman, and Allen Kent. Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. 7 — Curve Fitting to Early Development of Programming Languages. CRC Press. pp. 364–373. ISBN 0824722574. 
• William F. Raub (1974). "The PROPHET system and resource sharing". Federation Proceedings 33: 2390–2392.