The PROPHET system was an early medical expert system

Expert system

In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates the decision-making ability of a human expert. Expert systems are designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, like an expert, and not by following the procedure of a developer as is the case in...

.

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

ARPANET

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...

, 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

BBN Technologies

BBN Technologies is a high-technology company which provides research and development services. BBN is based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA...

) received the contract for implementation.

The PROPHET system was operational for 15 to 20 years before being superseded by more current Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

tools.