Method and system for accessing information using keyword...

Details Method and system for accessing information using keyword... Method and system for accessing information using keyword...

1999-07-12

2001-09-11

Teska, Kevin J. (Department: 2763)

Data processing: database and file management or data structures

Database design

Data structure types

C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C707S793000, C709S201000, C709S218000, C709S203000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06289337

ABSTRACT:

The present invention relates to methods and/or systems for accessing information by means of a communications system.
RELATED ART
The Internet WorldWide Web is a known communications system based on a plurality of separate communications networks connected together. It provides a rich source of information from many different providers but this very richness creates a problem in accessing specific information as there is no central monitoring and control.
In 1982, the volume of scientific, corporate and technical information was doubling every 5 years. By 1988, it was doubling every 2.2 years and by 1992 every 1.6 years. With the expansion of the Internet and other networks the rate of increase will continue to increase. Key to the viability of such networks will be the ability to manage the information and provide users with the information they want, when they want it.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
According to an embodiment of the present invention, there is provided an access system, for accessing information stored in a distributed manner and accessible by means of a communications network, the access system comprising a plurality of software agents such that a user can access information, using the network, by means of an agent, wherein each agent is provided with an intelligent page store, for storing summaries, together with associated data, of pieces of information accessible via the network, and multiple keyword stores for storing sets of keywords such that the agent can identify information for which an entry is made in the intelligent page store by applying either or both of first and second sets of keywords to entries in said page store.
In a useful configuration, the first and second sets of keywords may be associated with different respective users.
An agent might then be triggered to apply keyword sets to pages of information in (or being added to) the page store by different circumstances for different users. For instance, an agent might apply a first set of keywords in the course of a storage request from a first user. However, the agent might then apply one or more additional sets of keywords in order to notify one or more other users of the entry.
Preferably, a group of agents will share an intelligent page store, although there may be multiple intelligent page stores in or available to the access system as a whole. This sharing of a page store provides a way of enabling an agent to monitor new entries to the page store for notification to potentially interested users.
Embodiments of the present invention provide a distributed system of intelligent software agents which can be used to perform information tasks, for instance over the Internet WorldWide Web (W
3
), on behalf of a user or community of users. That is, software agents are used to store, retrieve, summarize and inform other agents about information found on W
3
.
Network systems such as W
3
are known and are built according to known architectures such as the client/server type of architecture and further detail is not therefore given herein.
The present invention is not concerned with providing another tool for searching systems such as W
3
: there are already many of these. They are being added to frequently with ever increasing coverage of the Web and sophistication of search engines. Instead, embodiments of the present invention relate to the following problem: having found useful information on W
3
, how can it be stored for easy retrieval and how can other users likely to be interested in the information be identified and informed?
Software agents provide a known approach to dealing with distributed rather than centralized computer-based systems. Each agent generally comprises functionality to perform a task or tasks on behalf of an entity (human or machine-based) in an autonomous manner, together with local data, or means to access data, to support the task or tasks. In the present specification, agents for use in storing or retrieving information in embodiments of the present invention are referred to for simplicity as “Jasper agents”, this stemming from the acronym “Joint Access to Stored Pages with Easy Retrieval”.
Given the vast amount of information available on W
3
, it is preferable to avoid the copying of information from its original location to a local server. Indeed, it could be argued that such an approach is contrary to the whole ethos of the Web. Rather than copying information, therefore, Jasper agents store only relevant “meta-information”. As will be seen below, this meta-information can be thought of as being at a level above information itself, being about it rather than being actual information. It can include for instance keywords, a summary, document title, universal resource locator (URL) and date and time of access. This meta-information is then used to provide a pointer to, or to “index on”, the actual information when a retrieval request is made.
Most known W
3
clients (Mosaic, Netscape, and so on) provide some means of storing pages of interest to the user. Typically, this is done by allowing the user to create a (possibly hierarchical) menu of names associated with particular URLs. While this menu facility is useful, it quickly becomes unwieldy when a reasonably large number of W
3
pages are involved. Essentially, the representation provided is not rich enough to allow capture of all that might be required about the information stored: the user can only provide a string naming the page. As well as the fact that useful meta-information such as the date of access of the page is lost, a single phrase (the name) may not be enough to accurately index a page in all contexts.
Consider as a simple example information about the use of knowledgebased systems (KBS) in information retrieval of pharmacological data: in different contexts, it may be any of KBS, information retrieval or pharmacology which is of interest. Unless a name is carefully chosen to mention all three aspects, the information will be missed in one or more of its useful contexts. This problem is analogous to the problem of finding files containing desired information in a Unix (or other) file system as described in the paper by Jones, W. P.; “On the applied use of human memory models: the memory extender personal filing system” published in lnt J. Man-Machine Studies, 25, 191-228, 1986. In most filing systems however there is at least the facility of sorting files by creation date.
The solution to this problem adopted in embodiments of the present invention is to allow the user to access information by a much richer set of meta-information. How Jasper agents achieve this and how the resulting meta-information is exploited is explained below.


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Morita et al, SIGIR '94, Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual International ACM-SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Proceedings of 17thInternational Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. SIGIR 94,

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