Education and demonstration – Computer logic – operation – or programming instruction
Reexamination Certificate
1999-12-09
2004-02-03
Weiss, John G. (Department: 3629)
Education and demonstration
Computer logic, operation, or programming instruction
C434S350000, C434S362000, C705S001100
Reexamination Certificate
active
06685475
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a learning control information generation method, an apparatus and a computer-readable medium storing a learning control information generation program. More particularly, the present invention relates to a learning control information generation method, an apparatus and a computer-readable medium storing a learning control information generation program in an information providing system which includes an information providing server, an information terminal which requests, receives and displays information, and a communication means such as a computer network which connects them. In the information providing system, the information terminal sends a request for information selected by a user to the information providing server. The information providing server selects information based on control information which is provided beforehand. The information providing system may be, for example, an information providing system using the Internet, such as the WWW (World-Wide Web) system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In the following, a hypertext system will be described as a first conventional technique.
The hypertext system includes an information server which stores information and an information terminal which obtains and displays the information according to a user's operation, the information server and the information terminal being connected via the Internet.
FIG. 1
is a block diagram showing the hypertext system. The technique is described, for example, in T. Berners-Lee et al., “The World-Wide Web”, Communications of the ACM, vol. 37(8), pp. 76-82. The system shown in
FIG. 1
includes an information providing server
10
, an information terminal
40
and a computer network
30
. The information terminal
40
and the information providing server
10
may be two or more respectively.
The information providing server
10
includes an information file
20
which stores providing information, a receiving part
11
which receives a request, a retrieving part
12
which retrieves a page from the information file
20
based on the request and a sending part
13
which sends the retrieved page to the information terminal
40
. The page is a unit of information provided to the information terminal
40
from the information providing server
10
.
FIG. 2
shows an example of a construction of information provided by the information providing server
10
.
FIG. 3
shows an example of the information provided by the server which is displayed on the information terminal
40
. The page describes not only text information which is visualized by the information terminal
40
but also information which is not visualized and is associated with a part of the text information. The information is called markup information. In the following, the markup information will be described taking the WWW as an example.
The markup information is distinguished from the visualized text information by bracketing with descriptors “<” and “>” as shown in FIG.
2
. The markup information is placed before and after a part of text information (which will be called element information) which is associated with other information. A part before the element is called a start tag, and a part after the element is called an end tag. The start tag describes one tag identifier, zero or more numbers of attribute names and/or an attribute name and a value of the attribute name in a format shown below.
<tag identifier attribute attribute=value>
The end tag is formatted as follows.
</tag identifier>
There are various kinds of tag identifiers. A representative example is an anchor tag which is shown in FIG.
2
. The anchor tag indicates that there exists another page which is associated with an element (which is called an anchor) corresponding to the anchor tag. The identifier is “a” or “A”. As shown is
FIG. 3
, an under score is displayed at the element part on a screen of the information terminal such that a user is notified of existence of the associated information. As an attribute of the anchor tag, there is an “href” attribute which indicates a location of the associated information. A format called “URL” shown below is widely used as a format of the value of the “href” attribute.
href=communication protocol name://server name/page identifier
The communication protocol shown above indicates a processing method in which an information providing server and an information terminal transmit/receive information. In
FIG. 2
, HTTP which is widely used in the WWW is specified. The attribute value which is specified by the href attribute is also called link information. Generally, the link information can be defined as URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) information which is included in the markup information.
When a user selects desired information, for example, by clicking on an anchor part of a page displayed on the screen shown in
FIG. 3
with a mouse, for example, the information terminal requests and obtains information based on link information corresponding to the anchor part, and displays the information on the screen.
By repeating the above-mentioned process, the user obtains necessary information one after another.
An execution result of a program executed in a server can be obtained by specifying a program name executed in the server and an argument in an href format shown below:
href=communication protocol name://server name/program name & argument=value.
Next, a personal adapting type hypertext system, which is a second conventional method, will be described. The above-mentioned first conventional method can not be used for education since appropriate information corresponding to user's circumstances can not be provided. The personal adapting type hypertext system changes providing information contents so that the information contents are adapted to the user's personal information. The personal adapting type hypertext system is disclosed in Japanese patent application No. 7-313053, “Information providing method and information providing system”, and Japanese patent application No. 9-124309, “Information providing method, apparatus and a computer-readable medium storing information providing program”. The personal adapting type hypertext system can be called a web-based training system.
A configuration of the personal adapting type hypertext system will be described with reference to FIG.
4
. The personal adapting type hypertext system includes an information terminal
40
, an information providing server
10
and a computer network
30
, which are also included in the normal hypertext system, and a learning support server
50
.
The learning support server
50
includes a receiving part
51
, a requesting part
52
, a personal information file retrieving part
55
, an adapting part
53
, and a sending part
54
. A personal history file
60
, a scenario definition file
70
, a target definition file
80
and a link rewriting definition file
90
are connected to the personal information file retrieving part
55
.
The scenario definition file
70
will be described in the following. The scenario is a description used for determining a display order of information when a user learns something. The scenario will be described by taking a three-layer hierarchical structure as an example with reference to
FIG. 5
since generally learning information contents have a hierarchical structure including a chapter, a section, a paragraph and the like. Information having the chapter structure has three items which are a chapter number, a title and information (which is called a pointer) indicating a location of a table describing information of the section which belongs to the chapter. Likewise, the section includes three items of a section number, a title and a pointer to a paragraph belonging to the section. The paragraph information includes a paragraph number, a title, a page name and a pointer to a target definition table which corresponds to the paragraph cont
Maruyama Mina
Nakabayashi Kiyoshi
Kenyon & Kenyon
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corporation
Ouellette Jonathan
Weiss John G.
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