Situational Nearness in Intellectual Data Bases

&bstract. The notions of a situation and a distance between situations in a narrow subject domain are introduced. ~ approach to the construction of an intellectual data base is suggested. The main task.of this data base is to find situations ~lhich are near to the one fixed by user. The theory of finite groups is considered as an example° I INTRODUCTION No~ information retrieval systems and especially bibliographic data bases are very widespread. Their possibilities are reduced, roughly speaking, to finding papers by their bibliographic descriptions and/or a list of key words. In view of informational burst in current science even this allows one to orient iu the ocean of papers, books, prepri,%ts and so on. Hou, ever the problem of finding the needed publication is still rather difficult. This is due to the fac~ t?~at o Cten the title of a paper and its review doesn't a!lo~ one to judge adequately about results of the paper and especially about methods used for achieving these results. In some domains it is even more difficult because of significant size of papers. In theory of finite groups, say, this size amounts to 100 and more journal pages. Because of that it would be desirable to consider not a paper as a whole but as the set of results and methods from it. \t present the existing intellectual data bases allow to work in terms o C results. However the main method for selection of information in such systems is the logical inference, which is, by our opiniou, too precise, slow and 1984 TOC Search