Data processing: database and file management or data structures – Database design – Data structure types
Reexamination Certificate
1998-08-21
2001-10-09
Black, Thomas (Department: 2171)
Data processing: database and file management or data structures
Database design
Data structure types
C707S793000, C345S215000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06301584
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to data processing and, more particularly, to information discovery and visualization.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
There is a vast amount of information in the world today that is available by computer. For example, on the World Wide Web alone there are millions of web pages. In addition to the Internet, companies have set up local “intranets” for storing and accessing data for running their organizations. However, the sheer amount of available information is posing increasingly more difficult challenges to conventional approaches.
A major difficulty to overcome is that information relevant to a purpose of a user is often dispersed across the network at many sites. It is often time-consuming for a user to visit all these sites. One conventional approach is a search engine. A search engine is actually a set of programs accessible at a network site within a network, for example a local area network (LAN) at a company or the Internet and World Wide Web. One program, called a “robot” or “spider,” pre-traverses a network in search of documents and builds large index files of keywords found in the documents.
A user of the search engine formulates a query comprising one or more keywords and submits the query to another program of the search engine. In response, the search engine inspects its own index files and displays a list of documents that match the search query, typically as hyperlinks. When a user activates one of the hyperlinks to see the information contained in the document, the user exits the site of the search engine and terminates the search process.
Search engines, however, have their drawbacks. For example, a conventional search engine suffers from obsolescence of data in its search indexes due to pre-traversing a network to index documents. Documents are constantly being updated, but it may take months for the new information to filter down to search engines. Furthermore, a search engine is oriented to discovering textual information only. In particular, conventional search engines are not well-suited to indexing information contained in structured databases, e.g. relational databases, and mixing data from incompatible data sources is difficult in conventional search engines.
Attempts have been made to present search results in an object-oriented fashion by homogenizing the search results into an “entity” that is an instance of a specified class, which may be hierarchically dependent upon another “base” class. A class specifies the attributes or properties of an entity, and a dependent class includes the attributes of the base class and additional attributes. A problem with such attempts is that the particular data returned for a particular entity is restricted to the attributes defined for the specified class of the entity. This restriction means that if the entity to be returned actually belongs to a dependent class, hierarchically dependent upon the specified class, the number of attributes returned to the user will be limited to the properties for the base class, not the dependent class. Consequently, some search results will be not be found and presented to the user. If, however, the user wants to check if a particular entity belongs to a dependent class, another query to the system has to be submitted, specifying the particular dependent class. This checking operation becomes more time consuming as more dependent classes are specified and more entities are found.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
There exists a need for a mechanism to collect relevant information located at a plurality of sites and stored in plurality of incompatible formats according to configurable search strategies.
These and other needs are met by the present invention, which dynamically gathers information from a diversity of data sources with agents, organizes the information in an configurable, information model, and visualizes the information according to a view.
Accordingly, one aspect of the invention relates to an entity retrieving system connectable to at least one data source comprising a memory and a processor connected to an interface. The memory stores a number of classes, in which each class defines the structure of an entity, including property definitions that identify property values stored in the data sources and to be retrieved dedicated to the property definition. The classes include at least one dependent class that is hierarchically linked to at least one other class and contains additional property definitions specifying additional property values, in addition to the property values of the class from which it depends.
The processor, in cooperation with the interface, is configured for receiving a query, which includes an identifier for identifying a particular class and at least one of the property values. The processor also selects, among the classes, the particular class dedicated to the identifier under control of said query, accesses the data sources, retrieves property values pertaining to at least one particular entity that comprises that property value, and outputs the retrieve entities. Upon establishing that the particular entity pertains to one of said dependent classes of the selected particular class, the processor is configured to retrieve the additional properties of the dependent class. According to another aspect, the processor is configured for invoking a plurality of agents concurrently to gather the requested information from the data sources.
Additional objects, advantages, and novel features of the present invention will be set forth in part in the description that follows, and in part, will become apparent upon examination or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and obtained by means of the instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.
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Black Thomas
Home Information Services, Inc.
McDermott & Will & Emery
Rones Charles L.
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