Authoring tools, including content-driven treetables, for fluid text

• US 20030229607A1
• Filed: 06/10/2002
• Published: 12/11/2003
• Est. Priority Date: 06/10/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Xerox Corporation (Xerox Holdings Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Xerox Corporation (Xerox Holdings Corp.)
• Inventors: BACK, MARIBETH, ZELLWEGER, POLLE T., NEWMAN, PAULA
• Granted Patent: US 7,120,622 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/322 Trees
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/103 Formatting, i.e. changing of presentation of documents automatic justification G06F40/189; automatic line break hyphenation G06F40/191
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/183 Tabulation, i.e. one-dimensional positioning
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99931 Database or file accessing
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99945 Object-oriented database structure processing

Abstract

Plural versions of an authoring/editing tool for fluid text include both a WYSIWYG editor and a content-driven treetable editor for producing narratives and their behavioral control in a fluid text viewing system environment. The tool includes content-driven treetable visualization and layout mechanisms for authoring and/or editing hypertext narratives, electronic mail threads and other tree-oriented applications. Edit operations are disclosed that permit interactive development and modification of treetables.

Claims

1. An authoring and editing tool for a hypertext fluid data narrative system, comprising:

means providing a visualization of a set of alternative sentences or sentence fragments expressed as a tree which has multiple paths therethrough; and

means for simultaneously visualizing multiple paths through the tree in the form of a content-driven treetable having one or more cells.

21. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, wherein the display displays all tree paths simultaneously, together with data associated with the paths

22. The authoring and editing tool of claim 21, wherein the data associated with the paths is displayed in a tabular format.

23. The authoring and editing tool of claim 21, wherein the display has node cells and each displayed node cell spans cells representing its children in the tree.

24. The authoring and editing tool of claim 23, wherein the cells may have different heights to minimize wasted space on the display.

25. The authoring and editing tool of claim 21, wherein the display has columns and the columns have different widths to minimize wasted space on the display.

26. The authoring and editing tool of claim 21, wherein the display represents points of convergence of paths which merge in the display with a cell spanning several parent nodes.

27. The authoring and editing tool of claim 24, further comprising a controller that provides a back dominator for multiple parent nodes.

28. The authoring and editing tool of claim 24, where the back dominator dominates only one merge node.

29. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further comprising at least one editing controller.

30. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further including a controller to add and/or delete cells and subtrees.

31. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further including a controller to create and modify cell content.

32. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further including a controller to achieve reordering of cells and subtrees.

33. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further including a controller to insert merge cells and merge dominator cells.

34. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further comprising at least one view controller.

35. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further including a set of view controllers which include a controller that identifies sets of focus cells, including column focus cells, which are all cells within an identified plurality of columns, and sub-tree focus cells, which are all cells representing an identified plurality of subtrees, and with cells not in a set of in-focus cells being out-of-focus cells.

36. The authoring and editing tool of claim 24, wherein different cell dimensions and different amounts of cell-included content are provided for in-focus and out-of-focus cells to emphasize in-focus cells.

37. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, further including a controller that provides a plurality of different data reading conventions for fluid data.

38. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, wherein the visualization is in WYSIWYG format.

42. The authoring and editing tool of claim 1, wherein the hypertext fluid data narrative comprises a taxonomy.

2. A method of visualizing fluid data expressed as a tree using content-driven treetables, comprising:

representing the fluid data as a content-driven treetable;

collecting a request from a user to modify the treetable; and

modifying the fluid data based on the user request.

3. A method of laying out content-driven treetables having at least one cell, comprising:

determining the total number of characters contained in each subtree;

assigning an initial width to the treetable as a whole, used as the initial width of a cell representing the root of the tree;

assigning an initial width to each child cell of the treetable, as a proportion of the width assigned to the parent cell representing its parent node, which proportion is based on the number of characters in the subtree headed by the node represented by the child cell, relative to the total number of characters in all subtrees headed by children of the node'"'"'s parent.

determining a modified number of characters associated with each node as an approximate area of a rectangular cell needed to accommodate the content of that node by said width assignment.

4. The method of claim 3, further comprising:

obtaining modified subtree character counts for each subtree;

obtaining modified widths for each child cell associated with a non-root node, as a proportion of the modified width assigned to the parent cell representing its parent node, which proportion is based on the above modified number of characters in the subtree headed by the node represented by the child cell, relative to the total modified number of characters in all subtrees headed by children of the node'"'"'s parent; and

assigning a final cell width and height to each child node.

5. A method of generating and displaying tree-structured data, including alternative narratives structured as root-to-leaf paths in a tree, in a content-driven treetable format, comprising:

generating and displaying a table which contains a plurality of columns composed of cells, wherein each cell represents a node of the tree, and contains content associated with that node, and each column represents a single path from the root of the represented tree to a leaf of the represented tree.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein each cell which represents a parent node in the above tree is located immediately above, and exactly spans, the child cells representing the child nodes of that parent node, but those child cells may have different heights.

53. The method of claim 5, further comprising undoing or removing a cell to return to a prior display of the table.

7. An authoring and editing tool for fluid data, comprising:

a display that displays fluid data configuration;

a control that adjust fluid data parameters;

a formatter to display fluid data in a WYSIWYG format;

that includes an entire path through a tree from a root to a leaf at one time; and

a view changer to display a different entire path through the tree.

8. The device of claim 7, wherein the view changer removes a previously displayed path from view.

9. The device of claim 7, wherein the view changer simultaneously displays a sequence of tree structures.

10. The device of claim 7, wherein the view changer opens one path to view and closes another path from view.

11. The device of claim 10, which moves successively displayed trees up or down the display.

12. The device of claim 7, further including a node operator that adds and/or removes one or nodes to/from the display.

13. The device of claim 7, further including a node manipulator that moves nodes to different positions in the display.

14. The device of claim 7, further including a node content changer that changes the content of one or more nodes.

15. The device of claim 7, further comprising a tracker that provides a log of changes made by a user to the display to keep track of what has been displayed or has not been displayed.

16. The device of claim 7, further comprising an inserter that inserts tree breaks into the fluid data.

17. The device of claim 7, further comprising an inserter that inserts knobs, tree breaks and node breaks.

18. The device of claim 7, further comprising a knob manipulator that deletes knobs from and move knobs to different locations on the display.

19. The device of claim 7, further comprising a grammar checker.

20. The device of claim 7, further comprising a knob changer to indicate changes made to, or traversals of, knobs.

39. A tool for tree-structured data, comprising:

a means for providing a visualization of a set of text sentences or sentence fragments expressed as a tree which has multiple paths therethrough; and

means for simultaneously visualizing multiple paths through the tree.

40. An authoring and editing tool for a hypertext taxonomy system, comprising:

means for authoring and visualizing the class and subclass definitions of the taxonomy, which form a tree, in treetable form,

41. A method of laying out taxonomy-based content-driven treetables, comprising:

determining the total number of characters contained in each subtree root;

assigning an initial width to the treetable as a whole, which is also the initial width of the cell representing the root node of the tree;

assigning an initial width to each other tree-node-associated cell of the treetable based on the proportion of the content in the subtree rooted in that node, relative to the content associated with subtrees rooted in other nodes with the same parent as that node; and

adjusting the initial cell widths based on (a) re-computing the amount of content in each node to account for the unused white space in the initially identified cell dimensions and then (b) reallocating the widths by proportional assignment as above, using the recomputed content amounts.

51. The method of claim 41, further comprising setting an initial height of each cell to accommodate the content of each cell.

43. A WYSIWYG method of editing fluid text, comprising:

generating a hierarchical data tree structure;

displaying the data in a content-driven treetable format;

editing at least one of the content, structure, visualization parameter and behavior parameter of the data;

displaying the edited data in a fluid text narrative format.

44. The method of claim 43, further comprising:

converting the edited data to machine readable and/or human readable format prior to displaying the edited data.

45. The method of claim 43, further comprising:

generating a history of the editing.

46. The method of claim 43, further comprising displaying edit history.

47. The method of claim 43, further comprising saving the edit history.

48. In a fluid text reader containing fluid text, the improvement comprising:

providing visualization system interaction controls including content, structure, appearance and behavior controls for fluid text.

49. A method of comparing a plurality of alternative paths in a treetable, comprising:

displaying the entire structure of the treetable and of each alternative path in a single table with a plurality of cells in a column and row format.

50. The method of claim 49, further comprising providing different cell heights across a row, resulting in unaligned treetables.

52. The method of claim 50, further comprising adjusting the height of at least one cell to reduce the amount of open space in the cell.