JP2012014709A - System for publishing, organizing, accessing and distributing information on computer network - Google Patents

Abstract

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To solve the difficulty in obtaining a desired document that information created and "published" to a network at a state that there is almost no regulation, or no regulation to a format and a configuration in addition to hugeness of an information amount.SOLUTION: In this system, "dimensions" are used for filtering information in a computer network. The dimensions can be categories such as geographical locations, company sections, employee classifications, and periods. Each dimension has a singularity or plurality of "elements". The elements are essentially "values" of the dimensions. A "community" is a set of a singularity or plurality of values of the dimensions, and defines segments of documents or information in all the usable documents or pieces of information, namely, "slices". A "theme" is used for further configuring the documents. The theme is a task category. The documents or document parts can be associated with the theme, and configured according to the theme.

Description

  BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION The present invention relates generally to data conversion in computer networks, and more particularly to a system for publishing, organizing, accessing and distributing information over a computer network.

  Accessing information and publishing information for access or acquisition by others is an important feature of computer networks. However, while it is a general trend to facilitate information access and publishing for users of computers and computer networks, many of the available mechanisms are not easy to learn for the average user. For example, publishing a web document requires not only that the user has some knowledge of where to publish and to which audience, but that It may be necessary to publish the document to multiple “sites” or locations in order to make the document readily available to multiple users. This is the case, for example, when a company uses a company's network or intranet with different websites associated with different departments, regions, etc.

  It is good or bad that the structure or structure of the web page or document is missing on the network. Due to the lack of structure, it is possible to easily publish a document without burdening the publisher to follow a predetermined configuration. In addition, this allows each website developer, online business, database, etc. to create a dedicated configuration that is best suited for that particular type of information. However, the lack of structure and configuration at the same time makes it difficult for network users to efficiently retrieve documents. In many cases, users must search and access various websites and utilities in order to search for documents. This requires a great deal of typing and mouse (or other user input device) manipulation, which can be time consuming, frustrating and unproductive.

  This can be compared to a newspaper with an effective and well-known structure. A reader of a newspaper can quickly obtain information from the newspaper by referring to a theme portion such as “business”, “sports”, “travel”, and the like. The newspaper also has a table of contents. Articles are organized in order of importance along with “links” to related news in other parts, such as the continuation page of the article. However, achieving this level of configuration means that considerable time must be spent for editing, page layout, pasting, and the like. Also, writers, editors, and other people must work together to produce such structured information. Traditionally, one method in computer networks is that each writer / publisher throws articles into a random network “container” and uses a loose structure such as keyword search, folder structure, hyperlink structure, or criteria structure. It depends on the mechanism.

  An example of a website structure that a typical company provides on an internal intranet is to provide various websites for each of its roles, that is, “personnel”, “marketing”, “finance”, and the like. If the company is large, there may be multiple regional offices and each office may have such multiple roles. For example, if the company has offices in the United States, Europe and Asia, there will be nine different intranet sites for information. Also, there is usually a main site for each regional office, for each department or configuration, and for the entire company.

  Therefore, in the example described above, there can be a total of 16 sites. A typical organization of documents associated with these sites is a way to point them to links. These links can be organized into categories on the web page of each site. This not only makes it very difficult to publish information when you want to make the information available from multiple sites, but it also helps those who are interested in searching for and getting information to multiple sites. You may have to visit. Also, the task of publishing documents to various intranet sites is usually handled by someone other than the writer / publisher. And depending on the number of documents and sites, this can be an enormous task, and there is a high chance of errors in the classification.

One conventional method for accessing documents in a computer network is keyword search. This allows the user to ask related questions such as “movie review”. The search returns a plurality of documents including the term “movie review” somewhere in which document. These documents may exist at multiple sites. The search is, for example, “AND
By including relational terms such as “the name of a film critic”, the scope can be further limited. It is also possible to specify a certain date or time. However, because of the vast amount of information on most intranets (and of course on the global Internet), the number of documents that match basic keyword searches is very large. Unless the user is familiar with the technical terms and types of documents related to the problem he / she is interested in, it is highly likely that many documents that the user is not interested in will be presented by keyword search by such users. These can be further filtered by refining the question sentence until the appropriate document is revealed. This method often makes it impossible to obtain a list of only relevant documents that the searcher is interested in. The range of keyword search is not user-configurable, and is determined by the entity operating the search engine and editing the search engine database.

  In addition to the vast amount of information, another difficulty in obtaining the desired documents is that they are created for the network with little or no restriction on their format and composition, It is “publishing”. In other words, the user can create and publish web pages containing text, images, etc. in any configuration. A document may or may not include a title, author name, publication date, and the like. The text of the document may be arranged by columns, paragraphs, lines separated by images or graphics, etc. In many cases, a document does not contain a short display heading that indicates where a field, such as the document's theme, begins and ends, or anything else, so at least as far as keyword search is concerned, Cannot be distinguished from the document body.

  One way to solve some of these problems is to make the documents on the network hand-annotated. This is usually done after the document creation (sometimes long after the document creation) by the person involved in creating the document, web page, etc. This not only requires a lot of effort and time for someone with some skill and knowledge in the field to which the document relates, but also by trying to compose and summarize the view of the document. As a result, the accuracy and searchability of information may be reduced.

  Another method is to use “folders” or subdirectories of programs such as email or web browsers. However, composing information in this manner is typically done manually by a viewer of the information (eg, email or web document). Since these folders are hidden from the publisher, there is no convention for publishing to a user's personal composition. When public organization stratification is done with folders, such tiers are usually large and complex and require a lot of time to navigate. This method also does not provide flexible security or access control.

  www. yahoo. Some websites such as com accumulate information such as documents, web pages, etc. from various sources and classify, summarize and annotate these documents. This multi-criteria configuration defines categories that are presented to users searching the Internet as a single level web page. Each next web page in the hierarchy (ie, the web page one level down in the hierarchy) includes a new subcategory option that further narrows the category. At some point, the user determines that the category is desired and clicks on the control device. Thereby, an information group matching the category is presented to the user.

  However, this method can often cause errors because the document needs to be interpreted and classified by someone other than the author. In addition, considerable effort is required to classify and write summaries. Another drawback is that web page navigation is slow. Also, the user does not know the whole classification method used. In other words, until the user examines the “tree” class in the hierarchy fairly deeply, the user does not know how many subcategory levels exist in the hierarchy or what classification is used. .

  Yet another disadvantage of the prior art is that it is not possible to index individual pages, sections or parts of a document. This is text that is maintained as a single document if it is desired to be able to access different parts of the original text, where only certain groups are maintained as a single document. Means that it must be divided into multiple documents. According to current network configurations, a very flexible security and access system is not provided. Typically, websites are limited to users with some kind of account or password. Each user who wishes to access the site and all of the site's documents must enter the password. It is difficult to maintain the use of a password because the account is set up and the user may forget the password. Furthermore, the granularity of password protection is very coarse because the entire website is usually open or closed to a specific user.

  Accordingly, to provide a system based on a computer network that solves some or all of these prior art problems and provides an efficient system for publishing, configuring, accessing and distributing information in a computer network. Is desired.

  The present invention allows a user to filter and view documents provided over a network. Documents are filtered based on categories. A category selector is a user interface tool that allows a user to select multiple values for defining a category. For example, values may be used to specify geographic location, company department, employee category, time period, and the like. Each category has one or more values. For example, in the case of a “geographical location” type value, the value may be “worldwide”, “Europe”, “France”, etc. The value of “company department” can include, for example, “human resources”, “marketing”, and the like. The value of “employee classification” can include “all employees”, “intermediate manager”, and “staff”.

  Using all four types of values described above, one category can be “Europe; Human Resources; All Employees; Prior to 1999”. Thus, categories define or filter segments of documents or information in all documents or information available in the network. All available documents or information should be considered as documents within a company's intranet or all documents available on the Internet, the world's web, individual websites, or other computer networks or databases. Can do.

  As will be described later, two different users who have selected the same category may or may not see the same document or document part. This is because in the present invention, the community designated by each user is taken into consideration. Thus, for example, a user with HR dimensions for the designated community may be restricted from viewing a document designated for accounting. The same type of restriction can be applied to each section or portion of the document.

  The preferred embodiment of the present invention generates a list of documents that satisfy the category definition. Category definitions are selectable by the user of the system using the “selector” tool of the user interface. The selector tool of this preferred embodiment presents a list of values for each value type in that category. Thus, the user can select a menu expression for creating a category definition. When a category definition is set, only documents that meet the definition are shown to the user. This greatly simplifies the user's task of searching many sites, servers, libraries, etc. on the network. Category selection and keyword search can be used in combination to provide powerful search capabilities.

  The list of documents that satisfy a category can be organized as individual documents or as a collection of document types. In other words, it can be organized into document types such as “history”, “demo”, “law”, “policy”, and the like. Each of these document types can include the name, subtype, etc. of the individual document. The set of types, documents of that type, and subtypes returned for a given category is called a “theme”. The category is referred to as “community” or “slice”. The type value is called "dimension". Community dimensions, dimension values, and themes can be set by the system administrator. The use of themes gives the user great flexibility and gives the user some ability to define new themes. A given theme can be associated with multiple slices. A user who publishes a document to the network is associated with a single slice or community. The default value for a published document is associated with the publishing user's slice. However, the user can choose to associate the document with another slice or multiple slices. Alternatively, the system administrator can change the document association.

  In one preferred embodiment, the present invention provides a method for accessing a web page over a network, wherein the network is connected to a server computer and a user computer operated by a user, In the case where the user computer includes a user input device and a display device, the method includes the following steps: transferring a part of a web page from the server computer to the display device via the network; Here, a portion of the web page is selected by the user having a selector that allows the user to select one or more of the following categories: geographic location, corporate department, employee division, time. In response to a signal sent from the user input device to indicate one or more categories Detecting user selection by receiving generated information, identifying one or more web pages associated with information satisfying the selected category, and information about the identified web pages Transmitting to the user computer.

Figure 3 illustrates the selector tool of the present invention. Illustrates exact filtering Illustrates upward filtering Illustrates downward filtering Illustrates the use of theme headings Illustrates a user interface mechanism for theme definition Shows a text search box used with the slice selector tool Illustrates part of the data model of the preferred embodiment Illustrates the portion of the preferred embodiment data model other than that shown in FIG. Illustrates basic hardware (computer system) preferably used in the present invention Exemplifies basic hardware (subsystem) preferably used in the present invention Illustrates basic hardware (general network generic diagram) preferably used in the present invention.

  FIG. 1 shows a screen display 100 of the user interface of the present invention.

  In FIG. 1, the selector 110 is configured as a set of four pull-down menus or lists. Each pull-down menu corresponds to one “dimension” used to define a “slice” or “community”. These pull-down menus 102, 104, 106, and 108 correspond to the dimensions of geographic location, company department, employee category, and time, respectively.

  The screen 100 shows a display state after the user sets the values of these dimensions as “US; human resources; all employees; all periods”. Therefore, the slice or community defined in the selector 110 of this screen display 100 is for documents published at all times related to all employees in the company's US office related to the company's human resources department. It is.

  A list of slice identification results shown in FIG. 1 is shown on the left side of the web page at 120 in FIG. This list shows two document type headings, “Brief and Policy”. In the career heading, three document types are identified as “Employment Policy”, “Referral Program” and “Training & Development”. The heading “Policy” indicates “Employment Guidelines” and “Policy”. Document list 120 is retrieved after the server automatically executes a database search instruction based on the defined slice. The server starts executing a database search based on the defined slice when the user clicks on the “find” icon 122.

  The user can view the selected document by clicking on the document name in the list 120. The document is shown in the document viewing area of area 130 of FIG.

  In addition to document names, uniform resource locators (URLs) can be shown in the list. By clicking on the URL, the user utilizes the website, web page, or other resource associated with the clicked URL corresponding to the user.

  Table 1 shows specific examples of values of each dimension.

  In Table 1, the values of each dimension used in the selector 110 of FIG. 1 are as follows. That is, the dimension “geographical location” can be values such as “worldwide”, “Asia”, “Europe”, “France”, “UK”, “USA”, “USA”, and the like. Of course, any number of geographic locations can be identified and included in the list. According to this preferred embodiment, these dimension values can be organized in a hierarchical structure. As illustrated in Table 1, the value “worldwide” has a plurality of values conjugated to it. These “child” values (as opposed to the value “world” is the parent) are indicated by a right progressive indent. Thus, “Asia”, “Europe” and “America” are each given one level of indentation to the right. Under the value of “Europe”, child values “France” and “UK” are associated. Below the value of “USA” is the value “USA”.

その他の次元の値も表１に図示されている。尚、これら以外の次元の選択肢及び構成、次元値も可能である。この好適実施例に於いて、システム管理者は、次元と、コミュニティ又はスライスを定義するためにユーザによって使用可能な次元値とを設定する人物である。従って、システム管理者には、このネットワーク中に於けるドキュメントの最も高レベルの構成化に対するコントロールが与えられる。ユーザは、情報をフィルタリングし、ドキュメントのリストを入手するためのスライスを形成するためにこれらの次元と次元値を使用する。

Other dimension values are also shown in Table 1. Other dimension options and configurations, and dimension values are possible. In this preferred embodiment, the system administrator is the person who sets the dimensions and dimension values that can be used by the user to define a community or slice. Thus, the system administrator is given control over the highest level of organization of documents in this network. The user uses these dimensions and dimension values to filter information and form slices to obtain a list of documents.

  Other configurations for implementing the selector 110 of FIG. 1 are possible. That is, each dimension is not necessarily a pull-down list of a plurality of items. For example, a complete list of all values for each dimension can always be displayed. However, the selector 110 can be made more compact by using a pull-down menu. This can leave more room for the display of the text of the document, or other purposes, for example. For example, any text entry may be possible so that even a list is not provided. This may be particularly useful for the “time” dimension to allow users to type in multiple dates and times. The time can also be set graphically by providing a slider, a clock, a calendar, and the like.

  Another example of a slice using the dimensions and dimension values shown in Table 1 is the slice “Europe; Marketing; Staff; This Week”. This provides a list of all documents created at the company's European office in relation to marketing department staff during the week when document requests based on that slice are made.

  Once a slice is set, all subsequent browsing for that user is done within that slice. In other words, the user is not shown any documents or document headings that are not relevant to the selected slice in the list 120 of FIG. Themes and documents that define any document headings are shown in relation to their slices, as described in detail below.

  Thus, the user can “filter” documents so that they have meaning within a single corporate structure. In this preferred embodiment, filtering can be done at different levels. The possible levels are “strict” and “downward”. Other embodiments include “upward” filtering, described below.

  Strict filtering means that only the documents associated with the given slice are shown to the user. FIG. 2 shows the results when strict filtering is used according to the dimensions shown in Table 1 and specific examples of dimension values. In FIG. 2, in strict filtering, only four documents in two categories satisfy the community “Global; Marketing; All employees;

  In upward filtering, other slices that have one or more dimension values that are associated with or match the selected slice but that are the parent value of the dimension value of the selected slice All documents associated with are listed. For example, using the geolocation dimension, the value “worldwide” is the parent value of the value “Europe”. Similarly, the value “Europe” is the parent value of the value “France”. Thus, if the user is filtering the slice “US; Human Resources; All Employees; All Times” illustrated in FIG. 1, the next slice, “US; Human Resources; All Employees; All Times”. And all documents related to the slice “Worldwide; Human Resources; All Employees; All Time” are also returned.

  One preferred embodiment of the present invention uses only strict filtering and downward filtering. Other embodiments allow the user to select one or more of these three types of filtering. Other types of filtering are possible.

  FIG. 3 illustrates an example of a document list that is returned when upward filtering is used for the community “Europe; sales; all employees; all periods”. Documents related to sales reports in both Europe and worldwide are returned.

  “Down” filtering is similar to “upward” filtering, but proceeds in the opposite direction with respect to its dimension value. That is, in this downward filtering, the selected slice and the slice having the same dimension value as the selected slice and having a dimension value that is one or more child values of the dimension value of the selected slice. All documents associated with the containing slice are provided to the user. For example, if the identified slice is “America; Human Resources; All Employees; All Periods”, then in addition to the document associated with that slice, the slice “US; Human Resources; All Employees; All Periods” The associated document is also returned to the user.

  FIG. 4 illustrates downward filtering. FIG. 4 shows the results returned by the community “Worldwide; Human Resources; All Employees; All Time”. A number of documents are shown for all geographical regions of the human resources department.

  A modification of the selector tool is illustrated in FIG.

  In FIG. 7, the selector 140 has dimensions similar to those of the selector 110 in FIG. 1, but in addition to these dimensions, a dimension of “hobby” is further added. Further, a text entry window 142 is provided along the search button 144. By using this text entry window and a search button, the user can perform a keyword search within the defined slice. Thereafter, all documents in slice filtering that also contain the text phase or keyword specified in the text entry window are displayed to the user. It should be noted that a modified configuration such as enabling a related expression in the text entry window is also possible.

  Thus, slices are used to provide filtering capabilities across multiple documents, such as one or more websites, servers, databases, etc. Slices are easily selected by the user using the selector tool described above. Other filtering modes can also be used.

According to another feature of the present invention, the user can predefine slices that can be recalled later. Such a predefined slice is referred to as a “channel”. Thus, the user selects a slice such as “US; Human Resources; All Employees; All Time” and associates it with this slice.
A label such as “US HR” can be selected. Once designated as one channel, "All
A hyperlink "US HR" is displayed on the user's display. This can be displayed on a web page or as part of a continuously displayed toolbar, sidebar, etc. The user can then conveniently recall the slice by simply clicking on the channel. The user can thus define a plurality of channels.

  A predefined channel or list of channels can be prepared and sent to other users. For example, if a channel is listed on a web page, the web page can be emailed to one or more other users. By opening this emailed web page and clicking on the desired channel, the slice associated with that channel becomes the slice selected by the user.

A publishing user can publish documents to the system. Document publishing and access is best understood by using two concepts: "coordinate" location and visibility "range".

  Coordinates are a specific set of dimension values associated with a user or document (or document section). Another way of thinking of coordinates is to think of it as a community with which a user or document is associated. For example, a user may belong to the “France”, “Human Resources” community. Typically, a document published by a user is given the same coordinates or community as the publishing user. A user having coordinates “France”; “human resources” will publish to the same coordinates. However, the system administrator can set the system to use other coordinate values as default coordinates for publishing for all given users, departments, geographical locations, communities, etc.

  In addition, the user can be allowed to publish the document to multiple coordinates. One way to do this is to allow the user to override the default setting using the selector 110 of FIG. 1 to create a correlation between the document that the user publishes and the desired coordinates. This is an acceptable method. The user publishes to a certain coordinate by displaying the document in the document browsing area 130 and clicking the “publishing” icon 124. When clicking the publishing icon 124, any coordinates (ie, dimension value sets) selected by the selector 110 are associated with the document. The user publishes to a plurality of coordinates by selecting the next coordinate to publish and then clicking the “publishing” icon 124 while the published document is displayed. Note that the search rules described above, for example, upward filtering, allow users with coordinates other than the coordinates that published the document to view and access the document as long as the user is in the filtering rule. Is acceptable.

  The concept of “range” means a set of all user coordinates that can view and access a single document. This can be more than the user whose coordinates the document was published and the coordinates contained within the filtering rules.

  A system administrator can add coordinates to a range of a document (or document section). The system administrator can authorize and prohibit users from accessing predetermined coordinates. This provides security and access control based on arbitrary dimension values, such as geographic region, employee status, and the like. A system administrator or another user, or a user belonging to certain coordinates, can be prevented from viewing certain documents or document parts. Thus, the document or document portion can use its designated coordinates in the system to set the “viewing range” of the document for the user, as described below. Of course, any mechanism that allows or restricts viewing of multiple documents or portions of documents may be used. For example, an access list of each particular community or coordinate that can view a document can be maintained. Along with this access list, an exclusion list can be maintained. Multiple portions of a document can each be associated with one or more coordinates that are different from coordinates associated with other portions of the same document.

  When a document is created, it is considered a section. This is referred to as the “master section”. In many cases, this is the only section of the document that associates the entire document with a single coordinate or theme (described below). Once a document is created, the author of that document can define multiple document sections, and these sections can be associated with different coordinates, themes, and access conditions. For example, a document may include sales reports that are excluded from all communities that do not have a “sales” or “director” value.

Multiple sections of a document can contain executable code such as Java, XML, etc., or the whole can be executable code. Multiple sections of a document can provide other mechanisms for invoking streaming media information and performing other tasks. Such executable sections can be associated and regulated in the same manner as text sections, as described above. This allows greater flexibility, capacity and control. For example, depending on an executable section, video or Shock
A Wave (R) window will appear and playback can begin. Java can be used to make embedded calculation boxes, spreadsheets, etc. appear in documents. Such functions can be excluded from users who are not associated with a given slice or who do not wish to access the functions. Other examples include a price list where European prices are visible only to people in the European community and US prices are visible only to US people.

Themes One aspect of the present invention uses "themes" to help organize the presentation of information to the user and to assist in publishing information across multiple communities. The theme acts as a category heading for documents belonging to a certain category.

  FIG. 5 illustrates a portion of the user interface of the present invention that illustrates theme headings. In FIG. 5, the theme heading is indicated at 150. A document name is shown below each heading. These document names are indented from their respective theme headings. Although not shown in this black and white drawing, the theme headings are displayed in red in the preferred embodiment. These theme headings function as standard category headings. For example, under the “Demo” theme heading, you can see “My Products”, “Kit Advance”, and “Kit Sales”. Although not shown, it is also possible to use sub-themes. For example, the “Demo” theme may have a sub-theme “Kit”, under which the last two documents are listed.

  Unlike communities, which have the effect of categorizing and distinguishing documents based on the company structure and time frame, themes organize documents according to document issues or types. In other words, a dimension describes a group or community of people, whereas a theme defines a content classification. For example, the theme may be a document associated with the employee “stock options”. Such themes can only be associated with countries that allow ownership of shares. In the dimension and value examples used so far, such a theme would be associated with the “US” and “UK” values in the “Geographic Region” dimension. Publishers can publish to this theme by selecting from a list of themes when publishing. This published document is automatically associated with US and UK values. The theme heading is displayed only to communities that have US and UK values (assuming strict filtering), along with the documents associated with the theme. The user can use the theme as part of the filter so that only documents matching the issue category of that selected theme (in addition to its slice or community dimension values) are displayed.

  In this preferred embodiment, for a document, a theme is selected using a pull-down list such as that illustrated in FIG. The user associates a theme with a section by moving the cursor into the section (eg, by clicking in the text area of the section) and selecting the theme. Each user is assigned a default community to which the user belongs. Document themes are assigned by moving the cursor to the master section and selecting the desired theme.

Hardware / Software Implementation FIGS. 10-12 illustrate basic hardware preferably used in the present invention.

  FIG. 10 illustrates a computer system 1 with a display 3 having a display screen 5. The cabinet 7 includes standard computer components (not shown) such as a desk drive, CDROM drive, display adapter, network card, random access memory (RAM), central processing unit (CPU), other components, subsystems and devices. Is stored. A user input device such as a mouse 11 and a keyboard 9 provided with buttons 13 is shown. Other user input devices such as trackballs, touch screens, digitizing tablets, etc. can also be used. In general, this computer system is merely illustrative of one type of computer system, such as a desktop computer, that is preferably used with the present invention. Computers can be built with various hardware components and can be built with various dimensions and styles (eg, laptop, palmtop, pentop, server, workstation, mainframe). . Any hardware platform suitable for performing the processing described herein can be suitably used in the present invention.

  FIG. 11 illustrates a typical subsystem found in a computer such as computer 100.

  In FIG. 11, the subsystems in box 20 are directly interfaced to internal bus 22. As described above, the subsystem is normally housed in a computer system such as the cabinet 7 of FIG. The subsystems include an input / output (I / O) controller 24, a system random access memory (RAM) 26, a central processing unit (CPU) 28, a display adapter 30, a serial port 40, a fixed disk 42, and a network interface adapter 44. Is included. By using the bus 22, each of these subsystems can transfer data between them, and most importantly, their CPUs. An external device can communicate with the CPU, or can communicate with that subsystem via bus 22 by interfacing with other subsystems on the bus. A monitor 46 is connected to the bus via the display adapter 30. A pointing device (RPD) 48 based on the relative position of a mouse or the like is connected to the serial port 40. Any device, such as a keyboard 50, can communicate with the CPU without using the main data bus, for example, by direct means via an interrupt controller and corresponding registers (not shown).

  Various subsystem configurations are possible in addition to the apparent physical configuration illustrated in FIG. FIG. 11 is merely illustrative of one such preferred configuration. Subsystems, components or devices other than those shown in FIG. 11 can be added. It is possible to achieve a suitable component system without using all of the subsystems illustrated in FIG. For example, a stand-alone computer need not be connected to a network, in which case the network interface 44 is unnecessary. Other subsystems such as CDROM drives, graphics accelerators, etc. can be included in the configuration without affecting the performance of the system of the present invention.

  FIG. 12 is a schematic diagram of a typical network.

  In FIG. 12, a network system 80 has a plurality of local networks connected to the Internet. Although several specific network protocols, physical layers, topologies, and other network properties are presented here, the present invention is suitable for use in any network.

  In FIG. 12, the computer user 1 is connected to the server 1. This connection can be made by a network such as Ethernet (registered trademark), asynchronous transmission mode, IEEE standard 1553 bus, modem connection, universal serial bus, or the like. The communication link does not need to be a wire connection, and can be infrared, radio wave transmission, or the like. Server 1 is connected to the Internet. The Internet is symbolized as a collection of server routers 82. In practicing the present invention, it is not necessary to use the Internet for information distribution or communication, and this is merely illustrative of the preferred embodiment described below. Furthermore, the use of the server computer and the designation of the server machine and the client machine are not essential for carrying out the present invention. User 1 computer can be directly connected to the Internet. The connection of the server 1 to the Internet is usually made by a relatively high bandwidth transmission medium such as a T1 or T3 line.

  Similarly, the other computer 84 is illustrated using a local network at a location different from the user 1 computer. These computers 84 are connected to the Internet via the server 2. User 3 and server 3 represent yet another facility.

  It should be noted that the concepts of “client” and “server” are used in a very broad definition in this application specification and in the industry, and in fact, for devices and software processes executed on these devices. It is not fixed. Typically, a device or process that provides information to a device or process other than the server, i.e., provides information to a "client" requesting that information. In this regard, the computer or process is acting as a client at some point (because it is requesting information) and acting as a server at another point (it is providing information). It is possible to) Some computers are always referred to as “servers” because they usually serve as temporary storage for large amounts of information that are often required. For example, the World Wide Web (WWW or simply “Web”) site is often hosted by a server computer with a large capacity, high speed processor and a number of high bandwidth communication lines.

  Most commonly, server machines are not manually operated continuously by a human user, but instead have software that automatically responds to information requests at all times. On the other hand, some machines, such as desktop computers, are usually considered client machines because they are used primarily to obtain information from the Internet for the user operating the machine.

  Depending on the particular software that is running on these machines at any given time, that machine may actually act as a client or server as needed. For example, a user's desktop computer can provide information to another desktop computer. Alternatively, the server can communicate directly with another server computer. Sometimes this is characterized as “peer-to-peer” communication. The processes of the present invention, the hardware that performs these processes, can be characterized by terms common to the Internet description (eg, “client”, “server”, “peer”), Of course, the software can run on any type of suitable software, including networks other than the Internet.

  Although the software of the present invention can be provided as a single entity, such software can be easily run on multiple machines. That is, multiple executions of a given software program are possible, and a single program is executed on two or more processors in a distributed processing environment, or multiple parts of a single program can be It can be executed on physically different machines. Furthermore, two different programs such as a client program and a server program can be executed on one machine or on different machines. One program can operate as a client for one information processing and operate as a server for another information processing.

  8 and 9 are model charts of basic data objects of the present invention.

  For example, FIGS. 8 and 9 show that the document object 200 includes “BLOB_ID”, “DESCRIPTION”, “DOCUMENT_ID”, and the like. BLOB_ID indicates a blob table that includes additional information and / or references to other objects. Of course, any other suitable software implementation different from or modified from the architectures of FIGS. 8 and 9 can be used.

  One preferred embodiment of the present invention operates on a Microsoft NT or Unix platform. The client platform may be any computer, processing device provided by the consumer, and the like. In this preferred embodiment, Java is used for client-side processing, and Oracle8i is used for the underlying database engine. Again, depending on the nature of the computer processing, these details are just one implementation of hardware and software that can be used to implement the present invention.

  While the invention has been described with reference to specific embodiments, these embodiments are merely illustrative of the invention and are not intended to be limiting. The scope of the present invention should be defined only by the appended claims.

Claims (16)

A method of accessing a web page on a network, wherein the network is connected to a server computer and a user computer operated by a user, and the user computer includes a user input device and a display device. The method comprises the following steps:
Transferring a portion of a web page from the server computer to the display device over the network, wherein the portion of the web page is selected by the user within a geographic location, corporate department, employee division, time category; Has a selector that allows one or more to be selected,
Detecting a selection by the user by receiving information generated in response to a signal from the user input device to indicate the one or more categories selected by the user;
A method of identifying one or more web pages associated with information that satisfies the selected category, and sending information about the identified web pages to the user computer. The method of claim 1, wherein the selector has a plurality of pull-down lists, each corresponding to a category. The method of claim 1, wherein the information sent to the user computer is used to display a list of the identified web pages. The method of claim 1, further comprising the following steps:
Receiving a signal from the user input device to create a document; and receiving a signal from the user input device to associate the document with a category. The method according to claim 4, further comprising the following steps:
Associating a user with a category, and using the user-related category as a default category associated with the created document. 2. The method of claim 1, wherein each category has a plurality of subcategories, the method further comprising the following steps:
How to define a theme for associating documents with categories. A user interface for accessing a web page on a network,
Wherein the user interface uses a user input device and a display device, the user interface comprises:
Selector means for displaying one or more categories,
Detecting means for receiving a signal from the user interface device and detecting one or more categories;
User interface comprising selection means for selecting one or more web pages that satisfy the selected category, and display means for presenting a list of the selected web pages on the display device. A user interface for accessing a web page, the user interface comprising:
Display a selector for selecting one or more categories,
Receiving a signal from the user input device and selecting one or more of the categories;
A user interface for displaying a list of documents included in the selected category. 9. The user interface of claim 8, wherein the category is either a geographic location, a corporate department, or an employee division. A method for retrieving a document in a computer network comprising the following steps:
Define a first category with multiple category types,
Assigning at least a part of the document to a first type of said category;
Storing a portion of the document in a retrievable format;
Show the category to the user,
Receiving the input from the user to identify the first type; and identifying a portion of the document to the user. 11. The method of claim 10, wherein the category is a geographic location. 11. The method of claim 10, wherein the category is a corporate department. 12. The method of claim 10, wherein the category is an employee segment. 11. The method of claim 10, wherein the category is time. 11. The method of claim 10, wherein a plurality of categories are used, wherein the step of indicating the category to the user comprises a substep of indicating the plurality of categories to the user;
The method of receiving input from the user comprises a sub-step of allowing the user to specify at least one category type for two or more of the categories. 16. The method of claim 15, wherein the user identification is performed by a selector tool displayed on a graphical user interface to a digital processing system.

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