record 36 1 the present invention does not limit the number of fields to three for each record 36 1 36 2 as shown in fig1 or to any specific number of fields furthermore the present invention does not require that each record 44 contain the three specific types of data nominal ordinal or text as shown as an example in fig1 in one embodiment the records 36 and fields 44 of the database 34 are organized as files in another embodiment the database 34 is a relational database the files are relations the records 36 are tuples and the fields 44 are attributes of the tuples in a further embodiment the database 34 can be any type of database e g object oriented or other database that allows for accessing defined quantities of data e g object attributes or fields 44 that have the same type of information such as location of an air safety incident within larger groupings of data e g objects or records 44 the data evaluation application 24 includes functional software modules e g programs procedures routines objects or other software entities for a boolean matching process 26 ordinal matching process 28 and vector based matching process 30 the boolean matching process 26 performs a matching test for nominal data as indicated.