End user touch searching for cancer therapy literature

Abstract

This paper reviews work towards building an expert system for searching the cancer therapy literature on MEDLINE. A modified subset of the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) has been stored on a micro-computer and accessed via a touch terminal. Searches, previously requested of the Oncology Information Service at the University of Leeds, have been used to test out the principle of end user searching and the results compared with the searching expertise of a MEDLARS indexer. Original program development was in PASCAL, but a rule-based approach, which is independent of a particular programming language, has been developed for search term and frame selection adopting a 'blackboard' philosophy in tracing the process of selection. Work is progressing on an implementation using the expert systems programming language PROLOG, which has been found a very suitable language for representing rules and provides a ready made rule interpreter. It is suggested that this approach is superior in terms of retrieval performance compared with alternative approaches to end-user searching which fail to exhibit detailed knowledge regarding the subject matter of the search.