Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system – Display driving control circuitry – Controlling the condition of display elements
Reexamination Certificate
1999-11-30
2003-07-15
Cabeca, John (Department: 2173)
Computer graphics processing and selective visual display system
Display driving control circuitry
Controlling the condition of display elements
C345S440000, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06593943
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer-based information organization, and more particularly to a method of grouping pieces of information together to allow information to be forwarded to diverse displays in a form appropriate to a specific user. 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.
Continual advances in software and hardware technology have led to a proliferation of available information-based devices, including computers, telephones, pagers, and personal digital assistants (PDA's). Such devices are increasingly configured with the ability to interact and communicate with one another. For example, electronic mail may currently be sent to some wireless telephones and pagers, and PDA's may be used to access some Internet (also called “World Wide Web” or “web”) sites.
Information-based devices such as those described above generally include display screens for presentation of information to the user. The trend in size of these display screens depends on whether the device is fixed or portable. For example, displays associated with desktop computers are generally getting larger, to provide ease of viewing and/or accommodate increasingly complex applications and operating systems. On the other hand, displays associated with portable devices such as wireless telephones and PDA's are small and often getting smaller, to enhance, e.g., portability and battery life. A severe mismatch between the display sizes of two devices communicating with one another may result from these differing trends.
For a situation in which a device, such as a desktop computer, which is normally configured for a large display transmits information to a device having a small display, this mismatch in display size may be particularly troublesome. Because all of the information viewable on the large display will not fit on the small display, a procedure for sending a manageable amount of information to the small display must be used. For example, the information normally shown on the large display may be divided into portions and sent to the small display sequentially, or some of the information may simply be removed from the information sent to the small display.
Both of these procedures may be disadvantageous for the user of the small display. If some of the information normally shown on a large display is not sent to the small display at all, then clearly the user may be denied access to a desired piece of information, and the device having the small display does not provide true access to the information of the large-display device. If the information is instead sent in sequential portions, multiple downloads to the small-display device may be needed before a desired piece of information can be viewed on the small display. Furthermore, pieces of information which are best viewed together may be divided between different portions and shown on the small display at different times.
As an example of interaction between small-display and large-display devices, a system administrator for a computer system or network may connect remotely to a system terminal using a telephone or PDA. The system terminal typically has a large display screen, facilitating rapid access to the values of system or network variables such as transaction rates, application program status, and disk space availability using, for example, a graphical user interface (GUI). If the system administrator contacts the system terminal remotely in response to notification of a problem with the system or network, there is generally a specific set of variables which the system administrator must observe in order to properly diagnose and/or correct the problem. If some or all of these variables are not sent to the small-display device used by the system administrator until after several other pieces of information are sent, valuable time may be wasted. Furthermore, if the variables relevant to the problem at hand are not displayed together on the small-display device, or at least in close succession, obtaining the needed information may be significantly more difficult and time-consuming than when a large display is used.
The difficulty in obtaining the particular pieces of information desired may be increased in situations for which ad hoc information is needed. 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 the system administration application described above, or a list of Internet site addresses (also called Universal Resource Locators, or URL's) provided by a search engine in response to specific search criteria given by a user. Because the content of ad hoc information is by nature unpredictable, the likelihood may be small that a large-display device such as a desktop computer is configured to send the specific desired pieces of information quickly and efficiently to a small-display device in a given situation.
Difficulty in obtaining the desired pieces of information efficiently may also occur, however, in situations for which static information, such as information from a page within an Internet site, is needed. Such difficulty may occur because different users have different preferences as to which pieces of such static information should be obtained first. For example, one user accessing an Internet site established by a city government may be a citizen of the city who is most interested in obtaining links to various city government departments. Another user accessing the same site, on the other hand, may be a potential visitor to the city most interested in obtaining lodging and entertainment information. If both of these users are accessing the site using small-display devices, the computer hosting the Internet site is likely to send the content of the site to the devices in such a way that at least one of these users must wait for multiple information downloads and/or observe multiple screens of unwanted information before obtaining the desired pieces of information.
It would therefore be desirable to develop a method by which the most relevant pieces of information may be efficiently delivered to users of information-based devices having displays of arbitrary size.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The problems outlined above are in large part addressed by a method of configuring computer-based information for display, including assigning information tags, or labels, to pieces of information, or information units, stored in a computer system. In some embodiments, the labels are assigned by a user of the computer system, while in some embodiments they may be assigned by a developer of the information units, or assigned automatically by, e.g., an application program or operating system. The labels may be used, preferably by a user of the computer system, to set policy for the display of the 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. In particular, policy governing the way in which information is displayed may be set using a method described herein.
Using labels assigned to information units to set policy for their display may include, for example, using the labels to prioritize the information units and/or group selected information units together. The resulting priority and/or grouping information may be used by a display controller associated with the computer system in determining the order in which information units are sent to a display device. In this way, the information given highest priority by th
Cabeca John
Conley & Rose, P.C.
Daffer Kevin L.
International Business Machines Corp.
Van Leeuwen, IBM Leslie A.
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