Data element characteristics

Details Data element characteristics Data element characteristics

2000-01-04

2003-02-25

Kindred, Alford W. (Department: 2172)

Data processing: database and file management or data structures

Database design

Data structure types

C705S040000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06526409

ABSTRACT:

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS
Not Applicable
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed broadly relates to the field of billing and billing systems and more particularly to elements in databases used for customizing subscriber or customer information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Providers of services often want to track subscriber information to be able to provide more focus services. For example, it is common for a subscriber to be asked to respond to a series of questions regarding the subscriber's business information, personal information, hobbies, dislikes and other demographic information. The responses to these series of questions are typically entered into a subscriber profile by a customer service representative. The subscriber profile often is associated with a customer billing system.
In order to facilitate entering the subscriber profile information, a system administrator or other computer personnel for the provider of service must layout the tables and their permitted value types, i.e, whether the value is a string, a list, a numeric, an alpha-numeric as so on. The requirement to have a system administrator or other computer professional customize the subscriber profile information is problematic and burdensome. For each type of service, the system administrator must predefine fields. If the type of information changes for subscriber changes, or if a new type of information is desired to be collected, the system administrator must modify the database records accordingly.
Many times the type of information being collected by customer service representatives does not fit into a predefined table. Moreover, additional information being collected by customer service representatives can not be entered into predefined fields, and there is a risk of losing this additional information. Therefore, there is a need for a system and a method, for providers of services, to track certain changeable information about subscribers without the need to create custom tables and data entry forms for each type of data the subscriber wants to track.
Another problem with the profile information being customized by a system administrator is that many base database schema can not be modified. As an example, suppose a provider of service wishes to track the annual income of their subscribers by market segment. If the underlying database schema cannot be modified, this additional information cannot be collected. Accordingly, a need exists for a method and apparatus to overcome this problem.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention provides the capability to collect, track and monitor any subscriber characteristic required without the need of creating and maintaining separate tables in the database to store the data. The present invention eliminates the need for maintaining different viewing or editing components for different types of data (i.e., strings, numeric values, lookup values, etc.) and all the information collected can be stored in a single table. The present invention provides the ability to store different types of data for subscribers in a single table with a single Data Entry user interface and a Characteristic Configuration user interface.
More specifically, the present invention provides characteristics for subscribers that can be configured using a graphical user interface. The characteristics can be assigned to groups and market groups. Since the user interface for displaying, entering, and modifying and the value for each characteristic creates the correct edit controls for the characteristic dynamically at runtime, the appearance is of a custom form which would have required modification and maintenance every time a new data element was to be tracked.


REFERENCES:
patent: 5721827 (1998-02-01), Logan et al.
patent: 5813007 (1998-09-01), Nielsen

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