An improved method and system for providing context-sensitive help and interactive
search capability in an insurance claims processing system. A help information
database may include one or more index tables, one or more header tables and one
or more text tables. The insurance claims processing system may display information
from located help table entries in order of relevance. In one embodiment, entries
in the index table may include a relevance value for the occurrence of the term
in the help database. In one embodiment, the relevance values for the entries in
the index table may be calculated and stored in the index table prior to a user
accessing the help database. In another embodiment, the relevance value for an
entry in the index table may be calculated dynamically when the entry is identified
as an occurrence of a search term or of a step or step element code in context-sensitive
help. In one embodiment, relevance values for the entries in the index table may
be calculated using the position of the term in the text object (header or text
section), the number of words in the term, the number of words in the text object,
and the type of text object for the entry (header or text section). In one embodiment,
occurrences in headers may be considered generally more relevant than occurrences
in text sections, and therefore a different mechanism may be used to calculate
the relevance of occurrences in headers than the mechanism used to calculate the
relevance of occurrences in text sections.