Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1998-11-12
2003-04-08
Field, Joseph H. (Department: 2176)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06546406
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention is related to client-server computer systems for retrieval of electronically published documents. More particularly, this invention is related to computer document retrieval systems for large documents written using a generalized markup language.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Electronic publication of documents, using non-paper media for transmission and storage, has become increasingly common. Electronically published documents are generally viewed by computer, and are preferably rendered or displayed on a computer screen or other output device in a formatted form. The DynaText system, a computer system available from Electronic Book Technologies of Providence, Rhode Island, is a system which is particularly useful for this purpose for very large documents.
Electronically published documents are increasingly being made available using a general markup language. A markup language provides indications of structure of the document, but excludes streams of graphic display instructions which are typically found in formatted documents. Markup languages are more portable between a variety of different machines that may use different graphic display commands. A commonly used markup language is the Standardized General Markup Language (SGML), an ISO standard.
Client-server computer systems for electronically publishing documents have also become increasingly available. Such a system typically includes one computer system (the server) on which documents are stored so that other computer systems (the clients) can access the information. The server and client communicate via messages conforming to a communication protocol sent over a communication channel such as a computer network. The server responds to messages from clients and processes requests to transmit a requested document.
An example of a client-server computer system for retrieval of electronically published documents that use a markup language is the World Wide Web (WWW) on the Internet. The WWW is a “web” of interconnected documents that are located in various sites on the Internet. The WWW is also described in “The World-Wide Web,” by T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau, A. Luotonen, H. F. Nielsen, and A. Secret,
Communications of the ACM,
37 (8), pp. 76-82, August 1994, and in “World Wide Web: The Information Universe,” by T. Berners-Lee, et al.,
in Electronic Networking: Research, Applications and Policy
, Vol. 1, No. 2, Meckler, Westport, Conn., Spring 1992.
Documents that are published on the WWW are written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), such as described in
Hypertext Markup Language Specification—
2.01 by T. Berners-Lee and D. Connolly, Internet Draft Document, Oct. 14, 1994, and in “World Wide Web & HTML,” by Douglas C. McArthur, in
Dr. Dobbs Journal, December
1994, pp. 18-20, 22, 24, 26 and 86. HTML documents stored as such are generally static, that is, the contents do not change over time unless the publisher modifies the document.
HTML is a markup language used for writing hypertext documents. HTML documents are SGML documents that conform to a particular Document Type Definition (DTD). An HTML document includes a hierarchical set of markup elements, where most elements have a start tag, followed by content, followed by an end tag. The content is a combination of text and nested markup elements. Tags are enclosed in angle brackets (‘<’ and ‘>’) and indicate how the document is structured and how to display the document, as well as destinations and labels for hypertext links. There are tags for markup elements such as titles, headers, text attributes such as bold and italic, lists, paragraph boundaries, links to other documents or other parts of the same document, in-line graphic images, and many other features.
Each document available on the WWW has an identifier called a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). These identifiers are described in more detail in
Universal Resource Identifiers for the World Wide Web
, T. Berners-Lee, submitted as an Internet Request for Comments (RFC), as yet unnumbered. A URI allows any object on the Internet to be referred to by name or address, such as in a hypertext link in an HTML document. There are two types of URIs: a Universal Resource Name (URN) and a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A URN references an object by name within a given name space. The Internet community has not yet defined the syntax of URNS. A URL references an object by defining an access algorithm using network protocols. An example URL is “http://www.ebt.com” A URL has the syntax “scheme://host:port/path?selector” where “scheme” identifies the access protocol (such as HTTP, FTP or GOPHER); “host” is the Internet domain name of the machine that supports the protocol; “port” is an optional the transfer control protocol (TCP) port number of the appropriate server (if different from the default); “path” is an identification of the object; and “selector” contains optional parameters.
An Internet site electronically publishes documents on the WWW documents is called a “Web site” and runs a “Web server,” which is a computer program that allows a computer on the network to make documents available via the WWW. The documents are often hypertext documents in the HTML language, but may be other types of documents. Several Web server software packages exist that provide information on the Web, such as the Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) server or the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) server. Web servers have been implemented for several different platforms, including the Sun Sparc 11 workstation running the Unix operating system, and personal computers with the Intel Pentium processor running the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system and the Microsoft Windows operating environment. The Web server also has a standard interface for running external programs, called the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). A gateway is a program that handles incoming information requests and returns the appropriate document or generates a document dynamically. For example, a gateway might receive queries, look up the answer in an SQL database, and translate the response into a page of HTML so that the server can send the result to the client. A gateway program may be written in a language such as “C” or in a scripting language such as Practical Extraction and Report Language (Perl) or Tcl or one of the Unix operating system shell languages. Perl is described in more detail in
Programming Perl
. by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, Calif., USA, 1992. The CGI standard specifies how the script or application receives input and parameters, and specifies how any output should be formatted and returned to the server.
A user (typically using a machine other than the machine used by the Web server) accesses documents published on the WWW runs a client program called a “Web browser.” The Web browser allows the user to retrieve and display documents from Web servers. Some of the popular Web browser programs are: the Navigator browser from NetScape Communications, Corp., of Mountain View, Calif.; the Mosaic browser from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); the WinWeb browser, from Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. of Austin, Tex.; and the InternetWorks browser, from BookLink Technology, of Needham, Mass. Browsers exist for many platforms, including personal computers with the Intel Pentium processor running the Microsoft MS-DOS operating system and the Microsoft Windows environment, and Apple Macintosh personal computers.
The Web server and the Web browser communicate using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) message protocol and the underlying TCP/IP data transport protocol of the Internet. HTTP is described in
Hypertext Transfer Protocol—HTTP/
1.0 by T. Berners-Lee, R. T. Fielding, H. Frystyk Nielsen, Internet Draft Document, Dec. 19, 1994, and is currently in the standardization process. In HTTP, the Web browser establishes a conn
DeRose Steven J.
Smith William C.
Enigma Information Systems Ltd.
Field Joseph H.
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