JPH09146962A - Method and device for supporting information space access - Google Patents

Abstract

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To make a user possible to understand distinctly the relation between pieces of necessary information and the degree of the relation when necessary information is selected out of a document present in an information space while browsed by using a browser. SOLUTION: Information displayed on the screen of the browser is read in, an URL indicating an absolute address position in the information space and an anchor part clearly representing the contents of the information are extracted (11), and the type indicating the attribute of the information is determined (12). All URLs of lower- order nodes that a URL obtained from a URL link information DB 19 indicates, are recursively extracted and all URLs of high-order nodes that a URL obtained from a URL reverse link information DB 20 indicate are recursively extracted (13 and 14). The connection in the directions toward the higher order and the lower order among the extracted URLs is represented as a tree structure 15, whether or not a node is the parent or child node of each tree structure is searched for, and the link relation between the URLs obtained from the initial screen of the browser is determined 16, and links are generated on the screen of the browser according to the determined link relation and displayed.

Description

Detailed Description of the Invention

[0001]

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION 1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates to an information space access support method and apparatus for selecting necessary information from a document existing in an information space typified by the Internet while browsing the information.

[0002]

2. Description of the Related Art FIG. 5 is a diagram showing an outline of information access on the Internet. There is a lot of information transmitted from all over the world on the Internet. A user needs to access various networks via the Internet in order to access such information from his network. In such a situation, FIG. 6 shows an example of a result of collecting information by using a conventional information space access tool in which a user searches for information desired by the user. FIG. 6 is a diagram showing a result of collecting information by a user asking the question "is there a system for searching information?"

In the upper part of FIG. 6, search keywords entered by the user are displayed, and in the lower part, information matching the keywords is displayed in order of likelihood according to a certain criterion.
The underlined portion is said to be linked to new information, and you can access the information at the actual link destination by selecting this portion. This is called link information in this. This screen shows Netscape (htt
It is for a browser called p: //www.netscape.com/) and uses HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language, ht
tp: //www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html
It is what is displayed by shaping it on the screen described by the notation called (see).

In the conventional information space access support method, related information is acquired from a huge information space in accordance with a user's request, and they are arranged and displayed according to a certain standard. At that time, the information was displayed based on the likelihood of the information requested by the user, but the physical relationship between the displayed information and the logical relationship were not displayed.

An example of such an information space access support method is "Web Agent Related Research at the Cent
er for Machine Translation, Mauldin & Leavitt, Pro
ceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Netw
orked Informaion Discovery and Retrieval (SIGNIDR-9
4), August 1994 ”.

[0006]

In the above-mentioned conventional information space access support method, the information corresponding to the user request is displayed from top to bottom according to a certain measure without any effort. Since they were displayed in order, the user
If you want to circulate the items with a high degree of association, you must guess the degree of association between the information from this screen, and if this guess does not work, you should access different pieces of information that are not related to each other in succession. However, there is a problem that it is not efficient when searching for information.

An object of the present invention is to provide an information space access support method and apparatus in which which information is related to each other and the degree of each relationship is clearly understood.

[0008]

The information space access support method according to the present invention uses the information displayed on the screen of the browser when browsing a document existing in the information space and acquiring necessary information. A chain of information located in the upper and lower directions is searched, the chain relationship is represented by a tree structure, and the parent-child relationship of each tree structure is visually represented and presented.

The information space access support method of the present invention reads the information displayed on the screen of the browser into the memory, acquires the URL indicating the absolute address position in the information space from the read information, An anchor part that briefly represents the content of the information is extracted from the read information, the type representing the attribute of the information is determined from the acquired URL, and forward link information between URLs is stored in advance. U for the URL obtained from the database of 1
The URL of the upper node pointed to by the URL, which is obtained from the second database that recursively extracts all the URLs of the lower nodes pointed to by the RL and previously stores the reverse link information between the URLs. Are recursively extracted, the upper and lower chain relationships between the extracted URLs are constructed as a tree structure, and the tree structure of the constructed chain relationships is temporarily stored. It searches whether it becomes a parent or child node of each tree structure, uses the search result to determine the chain relationship between URLs obtained from the initial screen of the browser, and determines the chain relationship between the determined URLs. Therefore, the link is created and displayed on the screen of the browser.

The information space access support apparatus of the present invention acquires the URL of the absolute position address in the information space from the read information and the means for reading the information displayed on the screen of the browser into the memory. Means, a means for extracting an anchor part that briefly represents the content of the information from the read information, a means for determining the type representing the attribute of the information from the acquired URL, and a forward direction between the URLs. A first database means storing link information,
Second, which stores the reverse link information between URLs in advance
Database means and a means for retrieving the first database means using the acquired URL and recursively extracting all the URLs of the subordinate nodes indicated by the URL, and a second database means using the acquired URL. Search for the U
A means for recursively extracting all URLs of upper nodes pointed to by the RL, a means for constructing a chained relationship between the extracted URLs as a tree structure, a means for temporarily storing the constructed tree structure for the chained relationships, and each stored For the tree structure, a means for searching whether or not each tree structure becomes a parent or child node of each tree structure, and using the search result, determine the chain relationship between URLs obtained from the initial screen of the browser. And a means for creating a visual link according to the determined joint relationship between URLs and displaying it on the screen of the browser.

According to the present invention, information that meets the user's request has been displayed by a single standard until now, but in addition to that, information that is related to each other is searched for and the degree of relationship between the information is obtained. By displaying the obtained result on the screen, it becomes easy for the user to access.

[0012]

Next, embodiments of the present invention will be described with reference to the drawings.

FIG. 1 is a block diagram of the information space access support apparatus of the present invention, FIG. 2 is a flow chart of processing of the URL link information acquisition unit 13, FIG. 3 is a flow chart of processing of the URL reverse link information acquisition unit 14, and FIG. 7 is a flowchart of the process of the inter-URL relationship determination unit 16.

The information space access support apparatus of the present invention, as shown in FIG. 1, uses the page information acquisition unit 10 that reads the information displayed on the screen of the browser into the memory and the information that has been read into the information space. Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that represents the absolute location address of the URL, the URL / anchor information extraction unit 11 that extracts the anchor portion that briefly represents the information content, the information type DB 18, and the acquired U
An information type determination unit 12 that determines a type representing an attribute of the information by referring to the information type DB 18 from the RL, and a URL that stores forward link information between URLs in advance.
The link information DB 19, the URL reverse link information DB 20 in which reverse link information between URLs is stored in advance, and the acquired URL are used to search the URL link information DB 19, and the URL of the lower node indicated by the URL is recursed. The URL reverse link information DB 20 by using the acquired URL and the URL link information acquisition unit 13 that extracts all
The URL reverse link information extraction unit 14 that recursively extracts all the URLs of the upper node pointed to by the URL, and the extracted U
A URL chain structure storage unit 1 for building a chain relationship between RLs as a tree structure and temporarily storing the created tree structure of the chain relationship.
5 and each stored tree structure are searched for whether each becomes a parent or child node of each tree structure, and the UR obtained from the initial screen of the browser is used by using the search result.
An inter-URL relation determining unit 16 that determines a chain relation between L;
The URL-related display unit 17 creates a visual link according to the determined chain relationship between URLs and displays it on the screen of the browser.

Next, the information space access support device will be described in detail.

First, the page information acquisition unit 10 displays the contents of the screen information displayed on the screen of the browser as shown in FIG.
Gets in TML format and loads it into memory. This is Ne
Uses what is realized as a function of tscape (a type of browser typified by WWW (World Wide Web)).
An example of the HTML file thus obtained is shown in FIG.
In this example, the information matching the keyword input by the user is displayed line by line. The format of the line is composed of the URL indicated by the HTML tag, the anchor part which is the description of the URL, and the score indicating the degree of agreement with the user request.
URL is a notation that allows various information on the Internet to be handled in a unified manner, and its general format is scheme: //host.domain [: port] / path [#anchor] [? Keywor
d]. Here, scheme represents the protocol to be used, and there are http. Gopher, ftp, etc. Continue, ho
Specify the server to be accessed in st, domain in the domain name format, and the path indicates the data position on that server. For example, in the first line of FIG. 7, URL ... http://some.host.jp/languages/japanese/i
ndex.html-anchor part ... service (service) -score ... 447 Examples of the URL and the anchor part are shown in FIGS. 8 and 9, respectively.

The URL / anchor information extraction unit 11 extracts these URL and anchor unit.

The information type determining section 12 accesses the information type DB 18 in order to determine what type of information these URLs have with respect to the URLs thus obtained. The type of information referred to here is whether the page indicated by the URL has a lot of information on its own, or has a lot of link information indicating where the actual information is, or both of them. Information type DB that classifies whether or not it has both
In 18, the type information corresponding to various URLs is accumulated as discrete values of 0 to 4. URL in information type DB18
FIG. 10 shows an example of actual information of the above.

From the left side of each line in FIG. 10, file ID, size, file attribute, compression format, source country name, type,
Describes the description language and anchor. The type information corresponds to the J4A4 portion of the 6 items in each line. In the example on the first line,
The type information is J4A4, which means that the discrete value of the type information is 4 and the discrete value of the guidance type is also 4.
Here, the guide type refers to a page that has a lot of hyperring information that serves as a clue to other pages.

When the URL, the anchor part and the score on the screen are acquired in this way, the URL link information acquisition part 1
3 acquires URL link information as follows. First, let P be the set of these URLs (step 3).
1). If the set P is not an empty set (step 32), URLs are extracted one by one (step 33). When one URL is input (step 34), the link information (hyperlink information) in the page pointed to by the input URL is extracted and all the URLs are extracted. Let them be URL (i) (step 35). URL extracted
(I) is stored in the memory (step 36). The number of URL (i) thus accumulated is set to n (step 37). With respect to the URL (i) thus obtained, i is changed from 1 (step 38) to n (step 40), and steps 34 to 38 are recursively repeated, and the virtual URL is input from the first input URL. All URLs linked to are extracted and stored in memory. As a result, a virtual relationship as shown in FIG. 11 is established between the extracted URLs. When all the relationships have been extracted (step 42), the URL reverse link information extraction unit 14 similarly performs the URL
The reverse link information is extracted (steps 51 to 62). This is the same as the subsequent processing, except that when the link information is obtained in the processing of FIG. 2, the URL pointing to itself is obtained (steps 55 and 56 in FIG. 3). The URL-related chain structure accumulating unit 15 constructs the chain relationship between the URLs thus extracted as a tree structure, and temporarily stores the tree structure. In addition, "reverse link information" means that there is some page pointing to the page when hyperlink information on a page exists, and refers to information of the page pointing to the page. Also, "virtual" is because, from the user's point of view, only one WWW page can be seen, and the end of a hyperlink cannot be actually seen.

As described above, the URL to which the relevant information is linked and the URL to which the information is linked are virtually displayed as shown in FIGS. 11 and 12. FIG.
1 indicates that information of several layers is present as hyperlink information from the URL at the beginning when the information is extracted, and in FIG. URL pointing to the information of
On the contrary, the relation of the URL pointed to is shown.
This tree structure makes it clear that some URL is related to all the URLs obtained from FIG. URL
The inter-relationship determining unit 15 uses the tree structure for each URL thus obtained to determine what kind of relationship each URL has.

First, p is the total number of URLs in the page displayed as shown in FIG. 6 (step 71). From that, one URL to be compared is selected (step 7).
2). This URL is compared with other URLs to confirm whether or not there is the same (step 73). If they are the same, mark them as related (step 77) and go to the next URL (step 7).
2). If not, the path of the URL is checked to see if it can be degenerated (step 74). here,
The degeneracy of a path means that the path is in several hierarchies and there is a path above it. For example, the path at http://some.host.jp/languages/japanese/index.html in the first line of FIG. 8 is languages / japanese / index.html. This is the language under the leading parent directory
There is a directory called s, and below this there is japanese
It indicates that the file exists. To degenerate this means 1. http://some.host.jp/languages/japanese/index.h
tml 2. http://some.host.jp/languages/japanese/ 3. http://some.host.jp/languages/ 4. It is supposed to delete the path http://some.host.jp/ sequentially. If the degeneration is possible, first, the path portion at the lowest position is deleted (step 75). With respect to a certain portion of the URL thus obtained, it is confirmed by comparing with other URLs whether there is a match (step 76). If they match, a mark of mutual relation is added (step 77) and the process proceeds to the next URL (step 72). If they do not match,
Check if the path is still degenerate (step 7)
4). In this way, all URLs are associated with each other, and the relationship between URLs is determined. Hello Step 7
If the path cannot be degenerated in step 4, after confirming the existence of the link and the URL having the reverse link relationship (step 79), the UR having the link relationship (child relationship) is first.
L is sequentially selected, and the same process as before is performed (step 7).
3). After the URL having the link relationship is completed, the URL having the reverse link relationship (parent relationship) is similarly performed. So we mark the interrelationships (step 7
7) The farther from the reference URL, the weaker the degree of marking.

When the relation between the URLs can be determined as described above, the URL relation display unit 17 displays this on the screen so that the user can easily understand it. At the time of display, the points assigned to the URL (the degree to which the search conditions are matched are scored according to a certain policy) are arranged as a reference,
The node type is changed and displayed according to the URL type. A display example is shown in FIG. In the case of this figure, the information type is displayed as an ellipse, the guidance type is displayed as a triangle, and the unclassifiable case is displayed as a square. The magnitude of the object (the display method of the URL displayed on the screen) represents the strength of each degree (certainty of the type of information), and the larger the magnitude, the stronger the degree of the type. Furthermore, in the process of FIG.
Links are established between items that are determined to have a relationship between URLs based on the degree of matching of information. In order to express the degree of association, the line thickness is determined according to the number of degeneracy when comparing URLs and the perspective of the relation between the link and the reverse link (the number of degeneracy). Further, by displaying the direction of the relation between URLs (whether it is a normal hyperlink or a type link), it becomes possible to let the user know which URL should be circulated first.

[0024]

As described above, according to the present invention,
The effect is that which information is related to each other and the degree of each relationship is clearly understood.

[Brief description of the drawings]

FIG. 1 is a configuration diagram of an information space access support device of the present invention.

FIG. 2 is a flowchart of a process of a URL link information acquisition unit 14.

FIG. 3 is a flow chart of processing of a URL reverse link information acquisition unit 15.

FIG. 4 is a flowchart of the process of the inter-URL relationship determination unit 16.

FIG. 5 is a diagram showing an outline of information access on the Internet.

FIG. 6 is a diagram showing a result of information collection.

FIG. 7 is a diagram showing an internal example of an information collection result file.

FIG. 8 is a diagram showing an example of a URL.

FIG. 9 is a diagram showing an example of an anchor.

FIG. 10 is a diagram showing an example of an information type DB 18.

FIG. 11 is a diagram showing an example of a URL link structure.

FIG. 12 is a diagram showing an example of a link / reverse link structure of some URLs.

FIG. 13 is a diagram showing a display example of a relationship between URLs.

[Explanation of symbols]

 10 page information acquisition unit 11 URL / anchor information extraction unit 12 information type determination unit 13 URL link information acquisition unit 14 URL reverse link information acquisition unit 15 URL related chain structure storage unit 16 URL relation determination unit 17 URL related display unit 18 information Type DB 19 URL link information DB 20 URL reverse link information DB 31-42, 51-62, 71-80 steps

Claims (3)

[Claims] 1. When browsing a document existing in an information space and acquiring necessary information, a chain of information located in upper and lower directions as viewed from information displayed on a browser screen is searched. Then, the information space access support method for expressing the chained relationship in a tree structure and visually expressing and presenting the parent-child relationship of each tree structure. 2. An information space access support method for selecting necessary information while browsing using a browser from a document existing in an information space represented by the Internet, which is displayed on the screen of the browser. Existing information is read into a memory, a URL indicating an absolute address position in the information space is acquired from the read information, and an anchor part that briefly represents the content of the information is extracted from the read information. Then, the type indicating the attribute of the information is determined from the acquired URL, and the forward link information between the URLs is stored in advance.
From the database of
A second method in which all the URLs of the subordinate nodes pointed to by the URL are recursively extracted and the reverse link information between the URLs is stored in advance.
From the database of the above, for the acquired URL, recursively extracts all the URLs of the upper nodes pointed to by the URL, and constructs the upper and lower chain relationships between the extracted URLs as a tree structure, and constructs The tree structure of the chain relation is temporarily stored, each stored tree structure is searched for whether or not it becomes a parent or child node of each tree structure, and the browser is used by using the searched result. An information space access support method of determining a chained relationship between URLs obtained from the initial screen, and creating and displaying a link on the screen of the browser according to the determined chained relationship between URLs. 3. An information space access support device for selecting necessary information while browsing using a browser from a document existing in an information space represented by the Internet, which is displayed on the screen of the browser. Means for reading the information stored in the memory, a means for acquiring a URL indicating an absolute position address in the information space from the read information, and a brief description of the information content from the read information. A means for extracting an anchor part, a means for determining a type representing an attribute of the information from the acquired URL, and forward link information between the URLs stored in advance.
Second database means for storing reverse link information between URLs in advance
Database means for searching the first database means by using the acquired URL, and recursively extracting all the URLs of the subordinate nodes indicated by the URL, and the second database by using the acquired URL. Means for retrieving means and recursively extracting all the URLs of the upper node pointed to by the URL, means for constructing a chained relationship between the extracted URLs as a tree structure, and temporarily storing the constructed tree structure for the chained relationships. Means for searching each of the stored tree structures to determine whether or not each tree structure becomes a parent or child node of each tree structure, and using the search result, from the initial screen of the browser A means for determining the obtained chain relationship between URLs, and a visual link is created according to the determined chain relationship between URLs and displayed on the screen of the browser. An information space access support device having means for indicating.