SYSTEM & METHOD FOR CREATING, EDITING, AN ON-LINE PUBLICATION

• US 20030204814A1
• Filed: 09/27/1999
• Published: 10/30/2003
• Est. Priority Date: 09/27/1999
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Original Assignee: International Business Machines Corporation
• Inventors: WEITZMAN, LOUIS, ELO, SARA
• Granted Patent: US 7,086,002 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/513
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/972 Access to data in other repository systems, e.g. legacy data or dynamic Web page generation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/143 Markup, e.g. Standard Generalized Markup Language [SGML] or Document Type Definition [DTD]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/151 Transformation
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/186 Templates
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/221 Parsing markup language streams streaming G06F40/149
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/295 Named entity recognition

Abstract

A system and method automatically generate an on-line document from raw text into an engaging, interactive form for a plurality of viewers. Unstructured articles are read from an information feed. A computation process extracts and tags proper names of people, products, organizations, and places and categorizes them. An image database is used to link these proper names with image files. The image database consists of a series of attribute-value pairs for active searching of names. A URL query string is inputted to the database to extract the location of the image in the database file system. An Extensible Markup Language (XML) file is created from the raw text of the article, the list of proper names in the processed data and the image file references. The XML file is stored in a file system. An Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) file provides templates containing computational relationships between the text and images. The XML and XSL style sheets are combined to generate a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) file containing an on-line story of the unstructured articles in a Java Applet which allows the system to provide a variety of interactive behaviors for a final presentation available by a viewer from a browser.

Claims

1. A computer system for creating, editing an on-line publication, comprising:

at least one information source describing an unstructured article from a digital news feed;

a processor coupled to the information sources and including a memory containing stored program instructions for storing images and text in the digital news feed;

a data bus coupling the processor to a storage device and an input/output device;

the storage device containing files relating to XSL style sheet creation;

XML article files;

image files; and

HTML files; and

data transmission means for transmitting an ActiveNews Article as an interpretive, object oriented program whereby XML article files are combined with XSL style sheets to generate an HTML file as an ActiveNews Article representing a dynamic visualization of the unstructured article from the digital news feed.

2. The system of claim 1 further comprising:

a text-processing module for analyzing stored text for occurrences of names in the digital news feed.

3. The system of claim 1 further comprising:

means for linking names in the stored text to images stored in the memory.

4. The system of claim 1 further comprising:

means for determining stored images to display with stored text in an ActiveNews Article.

5. The system of claim 1 further comprising:

means for converting stored text and images into an XML document.

6. The system of claim 1 further comprising:

means for creating XSL style sheets related to the XML document.

7. The system of claim 1 further comprising:

means for constructing an HTML document as an ActiveNews Article from the stored images and text after transformation into an XML document with XSL style sheets.

8. The system of claim 1 further comprising:

an XML enabler for combining XML files with XSL style sheets.

9. The system of claim 1 wherein the interpretive, object-oriented program is Java

10. The system of claim 1 wherein the ActiveNews Article is a Java applet.

14. The method of claim 1 further comprising the step of:

saving the XML object as an XML file.

11. In a computer system for creating and editing an on-line publication including at least one information source;

a process controller coupled to the information sources and including a memory containing stored program instructions;

a storage disk and an I/O device coupled to the controller, a method of transforming an unstructured news article into a dynamic interactive visualization of text and photos as an ActiveNews Article, comprising the steps of;

reading an unstructured text article from a digital news feed;

storing text in the unstructured article

detecting proper names in the stored text;

consulting an external media directory to find images corresponding to detected names;

generating an XML object containing the stored text, the proper names, and an image assigned to each section of an ActiveNews Article;

creating one or more XSL style sheets that transforms an XML file into an appropriate input for generating a dynamic visualization of the ActiveNews Article;

combining the XML file with the XSL style sheets to generate an HTML file; and

using the HTML file as the input file to launch a Java applet that generates a dynamic visualization of the ActiveNews Article.

12. The method of claim 11 further comprising the step of:

ranking by frequency of proper names with corresponding images.

13. The method of claim 11 further comprising the step of:

determining, for each section of the ActiveNews Article, which image to assign to be prominent in the visualization.

15. The method of claim 11 further comprising:

using an XML enabler for combining XML files with XSL style sheets.