Data processing: artificial intelligence – Knowledge processing system – Creation or modification
Reexamination Certificate
2000-11-01
2003-09-09
Follansbee, John (Department: 2121)
Data processing: artificial intelligence
Knowledge processing system
Creation or modification
C706S059000, C706S046000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06618717
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
Generally speaking a global computer network, e.g., the Internet, is formed of a plurality of computers coupled to a communication line for communicating with each other. Each computer is referred to as a network node. Some nodes serve as information bearing sites while other nodes provide connectivity between end users and the information bearing sites.
The explosive growth of the Internet makes it an essential component of every business, organization and institution strategy, and leads to massive amounts of information being placed in the public domain for people to read and explore. The type of information available ranges from information about companies and their products, services, activities, people and partners, to information about conferences, seminars, and exhibitions, to news sites, to information about universities, schools, colleges, museums and hospitals, to information about government organizations, their purpose, activities and people. The Internet has become the venue of choice for every organization for providing pertinent, detailed and timely information about themselves, their cause, services and activities.
The Internet essentially is the network infrastructure that connects geographically dispersed computer systems. Every such computer system may contain publicly available (shareable) data that are available to users connected to this network. However, until the early 1990's there was no uniform way or standard conventions for accessing this data. The users had to use a variety of techniques to connect to remote computers (e.g. telnet, ftp, etc) using passwords that were usually site-specific, and they had to know the exact directory and file name that contained the information they were looking for.
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply Web) was created in an effort to simplify and facilitate access to publicly available information from computer systems connected to the Internet. A set of conventions and standards were developed that enabled users to access every Web site (computer system connected to the Web) in the same uniform way, without the need to use special passwords or techniques. In addition, Web browsers became available that let users navigate easily through Web sites by simply clicking hyperlinks (words or sentences connected to some Web resource).
Today the Web contains more than one billion pages that are interconnected with each other and reside in computers all over the world (thus the term “World Wide Web”). The sheer size and explosive growth of the Web has created the need for tools and methods that can automatically search, index, access, extract and recombine information and knowledge that is publicly available from Web resources.
As used herein, the following terms have the indicated definitions.
Web Domain
Web domain is an Internet address that provides connection to a Web server (a computer system connected to the Internet that allows remote access to some of its contents).
URL
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. Generally, URLs have three parts: the first part describes the protocol used to access the content pointed to by the URL, the second contains the domain directory in which the content is located, and the third contains the file that stores the content:
<protocol>: <domain> <directory> <file>
For example:
www.corex.com/bios.html
www.cardscan.com/index.html
fn.cnn.com/archives/may99/pr37.html
shiva.lin.com/soft/words.zip
Commonly, the <protocol> part may be missing. In that case, modern Web browsers access the URL as if the http:// prefix was used. In addition, the <file> part may be missing. In that case, the convention calls for the file “index.html” to be fetched.
For example, the following are legal variations of the previous example URLs:
www.corex.com/bios.html
www.cardscan.com
fn.cnn.com/archives/may99/pr37.html
ftp://shiva.lin.com/soft/words.zip
Web Page
Web page is the content associated with a URL. In its simplest form, this content is static text, which is stored into a text file indicated by the URL. However, very often the content contains multi-media elements (e.g. images, audio, video, etc) as well as non-static text or other elements (e.g. news tickers, frames, scripts, streaming graphics, etc). Very often, more than one file forms a Web page, however, there is only one file that is associated with the URL and which initiates or guides the Web page generation.
Web Browser
Web browser is a software program that allows users to access the content stored in Web sites. Modem Web browsers can also create content “on the fly”, according to instructions received from a Web site. This concept is commonly referred to as “dynamic page generation”. In addition, browsers can commonly send information back to the Web site, thus enabling two-way communication of the user and the Web site.
The concept of Web site is closely linked to the concept of Web domain, however they have some important differences. Web site is a more abstract term, which refers to a collection of Web pages usually put together, owned, and maintained by a single entity (which can be company, organization, institution, person, etc). Very often, a Web site resides on a particular Web domain, however there are exceptions when the content of a site is distributed among several domains. In general, every Web site has at least one domain, however the opposite is not always true (there are domains with no corresponding Web site).
In many cases a Web site can be viewed as a book where each chapter provides information about a different but related topic and where it is assumed that the reader will correlate information from one page to the other so that there is no need to repeat the same information on every page. For example, a company Web site may contain pages dedicated to the company's mission, history, products, services, management, contact information, news, etc. The company name might not even be mentioned when talking about products or its management and is assumed to be conveyed by the fact that the present/currently displayed page is part of the company Web site.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The content published in a Web site can vary considerably in both its type and format: it may be news, information, fiction, statements, etc. given as text, pictures, video, audio, graphics, etc. The Web site content owner is the legal entity (individual or institution, company, organization, etc) which publishes and is legally responsible for this content.
Identifying the content owner allows tagging the information with its source, in order to filter it, estimate its value and accuracy, or use it according to attributes associated with this source. In addition to that, very often information collected from a Web site is incomplete if the site owner is unknown. For example, in Web mining projects that automatically collect people or Organization information (see Inventions 5, 6 and 7 as disclosed in the related Provisional Application No. 60/221,750 filed on Jul. 31, 2000 for a “Computer Database Method and Apparatus”) it is essential to know who is the legal entity that publishes this information. The reason is that very often, the information is given without explicitly specifying the entity that this information is about; for example, Corex Corporation publishes in its Web site a list of directors, under the simple header “Board of Directors”, without explicitly specifying “Board of Directors of Corex Corporation”. Human readers can deduce the implicit information, however, it is very difficult for automated computer programs to connect the information to the correct Organization name.
In addition to the above, identifying the owner of a Web site has value in itself, in composing a list of {Web domain, legal owner} pairs. There are already commercial companies that sell lists of this kind (e.g. Network Solutions Inc), however, they either create them manually, limit the list to only part of all existing Web domains, or do not update them on a regular basis to reflect f
Decary Michel
Karadimitriou Kosmas
Rothman-Shore Jeremy W.
Stern Jonathan
Eliyon Technologies Corporation
Follansbee John
Hamilton, Brook, Smith and Reynolds, P.C.
Hirl Joseph P.
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