Patent ID: 7974872

Claim:
A system for assisting consideration of selection that asks a considerer, who is considering at least one selection out of selection candidates in at least one field, questions concerning a field of consideration and assists decision making of the considerer by using answers to questions, said system comprising: a storage device in which electronic data is storable and which has stored therein at least one piece of selection candidate data in the field of consideration, evaluation data for a plurality of evaluation items with respect to each piece of said selection candidate data, at least one piece of question data concerning the field of consideration, said questions being classified into at least one class of question, option data with respect to each piece of said question data, and points of degree-of-necessity for classes of question with respect to each piece of said option data; a receiving unit for receiving at least one piece of option data as answer data of the considerer in response to said at least one question concerning the field of consideration, said receiving unit includes a question determining unit for receiving option data as said answer data in response to at least one question to the considerer, obtaining the points of degree-of-necessity for each class of question with respect to the option data as said answer data from the storage device, calculating a degree-of-necessity for each class of question from the obtained points of degree-of-necessity for each class of question and determining a subsequent question that belongs to the class whose calculated degree-of-necessity satisfies a certain fixed standard, wherein at least one degree-of-necessity is calculated by means of a function of points of degree-of-necessity with respect to said answer data in response to a plurality of questions; a degree-of-significance estimating unit for estimating a degree-of-significance that the considerer attaches to each of the plurality of evaluation items in comparison to the other of said plurality of evaluation items in the field of consideration from said answer data of the considerer, wherein said degree-of-significance is estimated by a function of said answer data; a degree-of-recommendation calculating unit for calculating a degree-of-recommendation representing to which degree each selection candidate is recommended to the considerer from evaluation data for each evaluation item with respect to each piece of selection candidate data in the field of consideration stored in said storage device, and said degree-of-significance of the considerer with respect to each evaluation item estimated by said degree-of-significance estimating unit; and a presenting unit for presenting said degree-of-recommendation of each said selection candidate in said field of consideration, wherein the selection candidate is ranked according to the degree-of-recommendation.