DYNAMIC CUSTOMIZED WEB TOURS

• US 20020002571A1
• Filed: 05/15/1998
• Published: 01/03/2002
• Est. Priority Date: 05/15/1998
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: YU, PHILIP SHI-LUNG, MANOHAR, NELSON R., WILLEBEEK-LEMAIR, MARC HUBERT
• Granted Patent: US 6,572,662 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/526
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/954 Navigation, e.g. using categorised browsing
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2216/07 Guided tours

Abstract

An interactive and dynamically customizable guided tour of some portion of the World Wide Web monitors and dynamically adapts in response to like-minded users as well as provides recommendations during the traversal. The invention includes features for: electronic commerce; side trips; true visiting of Web sites; maps; pre-fetching of Web objects; insertion of interactive decision points; customized insertion of advertisements; simultaneous traversal of multiple hyperpaths; collection of and dynamic modification of a tour based on collected route information and/or touring statistics.

Claims

1. A computerized method for dynamically customizing a tour of a collection of dynamic objects across a plurality of hyperlinked network sites, the method comprising the steps of:

providing interactivity points including one or more of tour navigation options and recommendations for the dynamic objects, based on preference information;

collecting and analyzing viewer navigation route information during the tour; and

dynamically adapting said tour navigation options and said recommendations based on collected navigation route information.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of dynamically providing said navigation options for alternative tour paths.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of collecting and analyzing viewer navigation route information further comprises the step of collecting and analyzing viewer navigation route on a route a viewer took to reach a current site during the tour.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of collecting and analyzing viewer navigation route information further comprises the step of collecting and analyzing touring statistics;

and wherein said step of dynamically adapting said tour navigation options and said recommendations is based on said touring statistics.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the network includes the world wide web, further comprising the step of displaying the tour over multiple synchronized windows in a browser wherein tour elements can include multiple not directly connected Web objects.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the preference information can be based on past similar navigation patterns.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising the steps of:

collecting one or more of user profile and specifications at the beginning of the tour including device characteristics selected from the group including video processing capabilities, video resolution and graphics resolution;

wherein the tour navigation options and recommendations for the dynamic objects is based on the device characteristics.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein one or more of the recommendations and the preference information is provided implicitly.

9. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of:

detecting a touring breakpoint operator; and

dynamically inserting content, in response to said detecting.

10. The method of claim 9, wherein the network includes the world wide web and wherein said step of detecting a touring breakpoint operator, further comprises the step of detecting a touring element with nil temporal URL(s).

11. The method of claim 9, wherein the network includes the world wide web and wherein dynamically inserted content is a touring sequence;

and wherein the touring breakpoint is a sidetrip operator, further comprising the steps of entering a side tour from an original tour; and

once completed, returning to a point in the original tour

12. The method of claim 1, wherein the network includes the world wide web, further comprising the step of dynamically inserted an object into a tour.

13. The method of claim 12 wherein an inserted object can be a sequence of Web objects.

14. The method of claim 1, further comprising the steps of providing one or more VCR-like functions selected from the group consisting of:

a fast forward over the content of a tour;

a pause; and

a resume over the content of a tour.

15. The method of claim 1, wherein the network includes the world wide web, further comprising the step of:

streaming and multiplexing web objects from one or more sources into a single browser window by dynamically creating multiple browser frames or multiple browser windows.

16. The method of claim 1, wherein the network includes the world wide web, further comprising the step of:

temporally ordering inter-object references in a tour sequence p wherein each ordered element e in p is associated with a presentation duration of e, and a token list K.

17. The method of claim 1, wherein the network includes the world wide web, further comprising the steps of:

automatically displaying a tour p using a Web browser in a touring client by traversing an ordered sequence of inter-object references which are uniform resource locators URL(a, b) where (a, b) are in p, where p includes the set of objects in the tour; and

displaying each object for an approximate predetermined presentation duration.

18. The method of claim 1, wherein the network includes the world wide web, further comprising the steps of:

storing a tour in a touring database;

referencing a start of a tour and retrieving the tour by means of a tour ID; and

distributing and exchanging tours by exchanging the tour ID, without exchanging and reproducing underlying Web objects.

19. The method of claim 1, wherein the navigation options include alternative tour routes, which can be of different lengths.

20. The method of claim 19, wherein the alternative routes include a different number of concurrent windows

21. The method of claim 19, wherein the alternative routes can be of different functionality, selected from the group consisting of:

with or without audio;

with or without video with or without frames; and

with or without graphics and graphics resolution.

22. The method of claim 1, wherein a display method is provided to skip Web objects in a sequence based on the viewer preference or route selection.

23. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of controlling a number of concurrent synchronized windows to be shown, based on the preference information or the route information.

24. The method of claim 1, further comprising the steps of:

collecting and maintaining user statistics on touring behavior;

identifying a preferred selection of a group of users which have exhibited similar touring behavior or routing information to a current user, based on the statistics; and

dynamically adapting said tour navigation options and recommendations based on the preferred selection.

25. The method of claim 1, wherein the network includes the world wide web and the dynamic objects include a collection of web objects, further comprising the steps of:

associating each web object with one or more tokens wherein the tokens can be of different types; and

capturing tokens from each visited web object; and

providing said recommendations based on the captured tokens.

26. The method of claim 25, further comprising one or more steps selected from the group consisting of inserting, disabling, or modifying specific tokens into a token bag.

27. The method of claim 25, further comprising the step of dynamically customizing the tour and omitting those Web objects having negligible membership in a class of a disabled token.

28. The method of claim 1, wherein the tour that is a separate object from the collection of dynamic objects, further comprising the step of preserving a continuity of a view imposed by the tour over the collection despite the absence of one or more of its objects.

29. The method of claim 1, wherein the tour may span paths not present in an original collection of dynamic objects.

30. The method of claim 1, wherein a membership in the dynamic collection of objects varies over time.

31. The method of claim 1, further comprising the steps of dynamically constructing and modifying the tour based on the preference information or the route information explicitly or implicitly provided during the tour.

32. The method of claim 1, wherein said step of dynamically constructing and modifying the tout further comprises the step of:

dynamically inserting Web objects into a tour.

33. The method of claim 1, further comprising the step of providing feedback on an impact of a dynamic adaptation to a remainder of the tour.

34. A method of performing customization for on-line commerce in a hypertext-based system, comprising the steps of:

providing a tour;

collecting customer information associated with a tour navigation; and

dynamically customizing subsequent site accesses in the tour, based on the collected information.

35. The method of claim 34, for dynamically customizing the tour of a collection of dynamic objects across a plurality of hyperlinked network sites;

further comprising the steps of;

providing interactivity points including one or more of tour navigation options and recommendations for the dynamic objects, based on the customer information;

collecting and analyzing viewer navigation route information during the tour; and

dynamically adapting said tour navigation options and said recommendations based on collected navigation route information.

36. The method of claim 34, further comprising the step of dynamically inserting a targeted advertisement based on one of the preference information and the route information.

37. In a hypertext-based system, a computerized method for dynamically customizing a tour of a collection of dynamic objects across a plurality of linked network sites, the method comprising the steps of:

providing interactivity points including one or more of tour navigation options and recommendations for the dynamic objects, based on preference information;

collecting and analyzing viewer navigation route information during the tour;

dynamically adapting said tour navigation options and recommendations based on collected navigation route information; and

detecting a touring breakpoint; and

dynamically inserting an advertisement Web object, in response to said detecting.