Computer assisted information resources navigation

In this paper, the design and development of Computer Assisted Information Resources Navigation (CAIRN) is discussed. CAIRN system is a medical information retrieval system that allows physicians and students to store full text medical information from any resource, organize and retrieve it. The most important feature of CAIRN is its capability to assist the user, physician, student etc. in selecting documents against a submitted query in Natural Language. The retrieved documents are presented in decreasing order according to their similarity to the submitted query. The nearest neighbour method is used. An alternative similarity measure based on a new calculation of the length of documents is proposed and some experimentation with it is discussed.