Inferencing Examples ◾ 73
Example 6.8
Given some information α, heuristic rules and past experience are used to infer
some information β.
e Web contains many sources of information about patients, hospital pro-
cedures, and physicians. ere may be many formal procedures, tests, and treat-
ments for a disease. Given some information α, which describes Bob, the user may
wish to determine Bob’s disease. However, the user may not be able to acquire all
relevant information to derive the correct disease for Bob: It may not be possible to
use our question-answering interface to get all the information about Bob and it
may not be possible to research all possible explanations for Bob’s condition given
the sheer size of the Web (and prior knowledge)