INTELLIGENT DATA-RETRIEVAL IN PROLOG - AN ILLUMINATING IDEA

This paper describes an intelligent data retrieval system, designed fo r the Epidemiological Observatory of Emilia Romagna, named IDEA. This system is an attempt to formalize the interaction between the data log ical view and its real physical organization in databases. The formali zation chosen comes from expert-system knowledge representation techno logy, following an approach similar to McClay. Its implementation has been realized using an object-oriented library of SICStus Prolog and t he APPEAL programming environment. The resulting system can be seen as the basic component of a general-purpose decision support system, who se development is foreseen in the near future.