Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1998-09-28
2001-11-06
Alam, Hosain T. (Department: 2172)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C709S218000, C709S224000, C345S215000, C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06314424
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to displaying data on the internet, and more particularly to dynamically expanding and collapsing a tree view for an HTML web interface.
2. Description of Related Art
Web browser technology has propelled the internet to what has now become a pervasive and nearly universal superhighway whereby a wealth of information can be readily retrieved and delivered to any requesting end user. As the level of activities on the internet increases, more and more information is available for search and viewing by the end user. Despite efforts to index and catalog this wealth of information, information access and subsequent visual access is one of the main challenges in developing a web based application server presently. In the internet environment, the successful implementation of the web application server is determined by how the information that resides on the server can be effectively presented or conveyed to the users. Although much of the data that resides on various servers has hierarchical properties, allowing users to traverse the server and access the hierarchical information is a difficult task. To achieve this, it takes web administrators a tremendous amount of time and effort to create and maintain a tree structured interface. This is primarily due to the rapid information changes on the server, the real time requirements of the users and limitations inherent in Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.
Wittenburg et all, “Visual Focusing and Transition Techniques in a Treeviewer for Web Information Access”, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Sep. 23-26, 1997 at page 20, Column 2 discusses the problem, stating “Yahoo”(http://www.yahoo.com) is a good representative of a design implemented in HTML. The presentation of search hits is augmented with HTML links representing paths of its large classification tree from the root down to local categories under which hits appear. This helps to organize the hit sets and to yield a context for evaluating their relevance. However, when users try to directly interact with the category tree itself, say by opening or closing its branches, only one level of the tree is visible at a time and an entirely new HTML page must be rendered. Maintenance of any other context information, say, the current hit set, is not done across views. Even though users can constrain their search to a single branch of the category tree, they cannot control or define multiple foci within a single view.
Prior art technologies using HTML to present the visual display of the information are static and administratively difficult to maintain, while those using JAVA are browser dependent and slow or inefficient to execute. Therefore, there is a need for an efficient and rapid access to the wealth of information on the world wide web that addresses the complexities of displaying the data while meeting the real time needs of the end user.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
To overcome the shortcomings of the prior art described above, it is an object of the present invention to provide an improved method for expanding and collapsing a tree view from a web interface.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for quickly and efficiently accessing deeper levels of information in a tree view web interface while maintaining the currency of the information displayed.
Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for expanding and collapsing a tree view from a web interface that is independent of the browser being used or the level of the browser being used.
Briefly stated, the present invention provides a system and method for expanding and collapsing a tree view from a web interface by using HTML to build the visual representation of the web server's information structure, which has the capability to preserve previous tree expansion states in the stateless web HTML environment.
In a networked application in a heterogeneous environment comprising one or more application servers running on one or more computer platforms utilizing one or more operating systems, and further comprising one or more remote heterogeneous client platforms requiring a hierarchical interface to traverse into the web based application server(s), the present invention provides a system for generating a visual representation of the application servers information in a tree structure which imbeds the tree expansion states directly into the icons of the tree structure to provide access to information in deeper tree levels which is faster and easier to use.
In a method according to the present invention, a request comes in from a client browser which contains a universal resource locator (URL) and information about the request such as encoding for the state information. The web server passes the additional information to the tree HTML page generation engine to generate the collapsible/expandable tree. The tree HTML page generation engine will call the corresponding query modules according to the information passed in from the URL. A linked list is generated according to the results returned from one of the query modules. The linked list is then passed back to the tree HTML page generation engine. The tree HTML page generation engine turns the linked list into an HTML page containing nodes and leaves. Each node has an embedded URL associated with it and contains a special encoding to memorize the tree expansion state information. The generated tree view is then returned to the web server and then to the browser.
An advantage of the present invention is that it provides an improved method for displaying data in a web interface.
Another advantage of the present invention is that it reduces the manual effort involved in implementing the web interface.
Still Another advantage of the present invention is that it reduces the effort involved in maintaining the interface when the information displayed is updated on that server.
Still another advantage of the present invention is the improvement of usability of the web interface, which helps users to access information quickly in deeper levels.
Still another advantage of the present invention is the use of HTML to generate the visual representation (tree view) for the web interface, which provides a solution that uses HTML constructs that are supported on a very wide variety of browsers, and are not dependent on browser support levels for Java or Java Script.
Yet another advantage of the present invention is the preservation of the state information directly in the HTML tags, so the previous state will always be expanding and collapsing.
The above, as well as additional objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent in the following detailed written description.
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Kleinberg, Jon M., “Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment”, Journal of the ACM, vol. 46, No. 5, Sep. 1999, pp. 604-632.*
T. Munzner et al., “Visualizing the Structure of the World Wide Web in 3D Hyperbolic Space”, Symposium on the Virtual Reality Modeling Language, San Diego, Dec. 14-15, 1995: VRML '95.
K. Wittenburg et al., “Visual Focusing and Transition Techniques in a Treeviewer for Web Information Access”, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, Isle of Capri, Italy, Sep. 23-26, 1
Kaczmarski Michael Allen
Tung Randy Yuan-Yi
Alam Hosain T.
Alam Shahid
International Business Machines - Corporation
Krall Noreen A.
Raissinia Abdy
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