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The PROPHET system was operational for 15 to 20 years before being superseded by more current Internet tools.

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

• Silvio Garattini (1975). Advances in Pharmacology and Chemotherapy. Academic Press. pp. 82–83. ISBN 9780120329151.
• 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.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• William F. Raub (1977). "Drug Information Retrieval Systems". In Jack Belzer; Albert G. Holzman; Allen Kent (eds.). Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology. Vol. 7 — Curve Fitting to Early Development of Programming Languages. CRC Press. pp. 364–373. ISBN 9780824722579.
• William F. Raub (1974). "The PROPHET system and resource sharing". Computers in Life Science Research. FASEB Monograph. Vol. 2. pp. 2390–2392. doi:10.1007/978-1-4757-0546-1_29. ISBN 978-1-4757-0546-1.
• 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 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.