SHRIF, A General-Purpose System for Heuristic Retreival of Information and Facts, Applied to Medical Knowledge Processing

We describe a completed project which, conceptually and technically, is a significant extension of IRUHS (Information Retrieval Using Heuristic Search) described in (Findler, 1979). SHRIF (System for Heuristic Retrieval of Information and Facts) is an information and fact retrieval system which emulates the natural strength and flexibility of humans in gathering new knowledge, grouping facts that belong together from some point of view, discovering and making use of partial similarities, handling uncertainties and incompletenesses, and making acceptable compromises when total consistency is not available.