Abstract
We present an information system developed to help assessing the microbiological risk in food. That information system contains experimental results in microbiology, mainly extracted from scientific publications. The increasing amount of the experimental results available and the difficulty to integrate them into a classic relational database schema led us to design a system composed of two distinct subsystems queried through a common interface. The first subsystem is a classic relational database. The second subsystem is a database containing weakly- structured pieces of information expressed in terms of conceptual graphs. The data stored in both bases can be fuzzy ones in order to take into account the specificities of the biological information. The uniform query language used on both relational database and conceptual graph database allows the users to express preferences by using fuzzy sets in their queries. The MIEL system is now operational and used by the microbiologists involved in the Sym'Previus French project.