Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Computer graphics processing – Graph generating
Reexamination Certificate
1999-11-30
2003-01-14
Zimmerman, Mark (Department: 2671)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Computer graphics processing
Graph generating
C345S419000, C345S215000, C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06507343
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to information organization, and more particularly to arranging pieces of information into at least three continuum arrangements, where each continuum arrangement may be associated with an axis in a three-dimensional representation. The method may be useful for multiple applications involving display of information, including platform management in heterogeneous systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
The following descriptions and examples are not admitted to be prior art by virtue of their inclusion within this section.
Increasing capability of computers, coupled with a proliferation of other information-based devices, including telephones, pagers, and personal digital assistants (PDA's), have contributed to continually increasing amounts of available information. This large quantity of information can lead to difficulties in finding specific information, and particularly in finding the information conveniently and efficiently.
As an example, it can be difficult for a viewer accessing a piece of information to know how that information is related to other information available from the same source. The source of information may be, e.g., an application program or an Internet site (also called a “World Wide Web” or “web” site). In other words, it can be difficult to tell what other information may be available, and how the information is intended to be organized by its developer. Current approaches to providing guidance to a consumer or viewer of information, which may be used on, e.g., web sites or application displays, include tables of contents or organizational trees. Such displays typically require a large amount of screen space, however, which may be particularly disadvantageous if the viewer is using a small-screen device such as a telephone or PDA. Other techniques, such as dividing displayed information into separate displays accessible using, for example, folder tabs along the top of a display window, don't allow the viewer an overview of all of the available information at once.
Even if a consumer or viewer of information is aware of the intended organization of a collection of information, accessing a particular desired piece of information can still be difficult because a limited number of specific navigation paths through the information collection may be provided. For example, information on a web site is typically arranged in a hierarchical structure in which “clicking” upon multiple “links” is required to reach a piece of information having the desired specificity or detail on the desired topic. This problem may be further exacerbated for a user of a small-display device, because only a small portion of the information intended to appear on a display screen may be viewable on the screen of the small-display device at any one time. Such limitations of the navigation pathways established by a developer of an application or web site may also make it difficult to move from one desired piece of information to another efficiently. For example, even remembering and/or retracing a path taken through a collection of information can present challenges. Although web browser programs often include a “history”, or listing of the most recent web pages visited, this history may be erased by accessing some web pages. Furthermore, the web page names listed in the history may not provide a sufficient description of the pages' subject matter to convey a relationship between the path taken and the overall organization scheme of the information. Such a relationship may be observable by comparing the history to the organization of the web site, but this may require clicking back and forth between multiple web pages (thereby complicating the browser history further).
In view of the problems described above, it would be desirable to develop a method by which a consumer of information could quickly ascertain the intended organization of a collection of information. It would further be desirable to allow the consumer to easily observe a path taken through the collection of information in the context of its organization. In some cases, a method of allowing the consumer to establish criteria for organization of displayed information would be preferable, so that desired pieces of information may be more quickly accessible.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The problems outlined above are in large part addressed by methods described herein of configuring information for display and displaying information. The methods of configuring information involve arranging pieces of information, or information units, into ordered sequences, or continuum arrangements. Depending on the embodiment, an information unit may take various forms, including, for example, a value of a system or network variable being monitored by a system administrator for a computer system, an address (also called a Universal Resource Locator, or URL) of a web page provided by a web search application, or a portion of the material included in a web page. Criteria for ordering of the information units may include the level of detail of the subject matter of the information units, the degree to which the subject matter of an information unit is related to that of a reference information unit, and/or other criteria, which may be defined by either the consumer or the organizer of the information.
The arrangement of information units into one or more continuum arrangements typically involves assigning one or more continuum tags, or labels, to each information unit. Such labels are a form of “meta-data”, or data about data. In particular, a label preferably corresponds to a particular attribute of the data, and the value of that attribute. The label is linked to the corresponding piece of data (or information unit as described herein). In a preferred embodiment, this linking is implemented by relating the label to a reference or pointer to the information unit, where the relating is done using some sort of data structure. “Data structure” as used herein refers to a collection of pieces of data (which may be meta-data) and any relationships between the pieces of data. One such data structure may be a rules database which contains rules, or policy, for assigning the continuum labels to information units. “Policy” as used herein refers to one or more rules established in advance of a particular situation or event to govern the response of a computer system to that event.
Establishing policy for arranging information units into continuum arrangements may be particularly useful in embodiments for which configuration of ad hoc information is desired. Ad hoc information refers to information generated or organized in response to a particular event or request, as opposed to static information which is always presented in the same form. Examples of ad hoc information include an alarm message generated in response to a failure detected in a monitored system, as might occur in a system administration application, or a list of URL's provided by a search engine in response to specific search criteria given by a user. Ad hoc information units may therefore not exist in advance of a triggering event which gives rise to the ad hoc information. Setting policy for collection of such information units and assignment of labels to them after they are created therefore allows establishment of continuum arrangements even for ad hoc information units.
The assignment of continuum labels to establish a continuum arrangement of information units as described above may be done by directly entering labels into a data structure relating labels and information units, or into a rules database containing policy for assignment of labels to information units. Alternatively, establishment of one or more continuum arrangements may be performed using a graphical user interface (GUI). In such an embodiment, icons representing information units may be moved using a pointing device and arranged into sequences on a display screen. The information unit icons may be arranged with resp
Cao Huedung X.
Conley & Rose & Tayon P.C.
Daffer Kevin L.
International Business Machines Corp.
Leeuwen Leslie A. Van
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