Method and apparatus for search, visual navigation, analysis and retrieval of information from networks with remote notification and content delivery
First Claim
1. A method of providing information, comprising the steps of:
- creating a plurality of autonomous search agents to identify portions of a plurality of forms of information stored in a plurality of sources;
retrieving identified information from the plurality of sources;
representing the plurality of sources as a plurality of three-dimensional graphical symbol object and icon nodes and associated links between sources as connectors between nodes;
visually accentuating the plurality of graphical symbol objects and icons according to a plurality of information categories and logic states and evaluation status;
visually captioning the plurality of graphical symbol objects and icons with textual flags indicating an information node title derived from the associated sources; and
permitting a plurality of manual navigation approaches to select, highlight and retrieve and visually rank the plurality of information sources according to preferred-quantitative and qualitative metrics.
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Abstract
A modular intelligent personal agent system is presented for search, navigation, control, retrieval, analysis, and results reporting on networks and databases. A client-side or server-side software application retrieves and interprets hypertext documents executing a search algorithm, which search results are displayed in alternate three-dimensional and two-dimensional graphical visualization formats. Hypertext documents and associated content media are displayed as symbol or thumbnail web documents as nodes with connector lines representing links between the documents. Nodes and connector lines are color-coded symbol form for the user according to truth of search terms, numeric data tested in hypertext documents, according to domain type, link density, and metric counts. Different symbols represent search and Boolean evaluation status, document type, and thumbnails represent whole or incremental portions of the document page or type documents found. The three-dimensional displayed nodes are visually navigated based on recency, chronology of discovery and metric information values. The result of searches performed by the system can retrieve user selected documents from a network and automatically format results of the search and content retrieval using a plurality of ranking methods. The system provides alerts and content delivery to users using email, instant messaging and audio. Multiple agents can operate to accomplish complex tasks a singular agent cannot. Agents are deployed
1134 Citations
20 Claims
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1. A method of providing information, comprising the steps of:
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creating a plurality of autonomous search agents to identify portions of a plurality of forms of information stored in a plurality of sources;
retrieving identified information from the plurality of sources;
representing the plurality of sources as a plurality of three-dimensional graphical symbol object and icon nodes and associated links between sources as connectors between nodes;
visually accentuating the plurality of graphical symbol objects and icons according to a plurality of information categories and logic states and evaluation status;
visually captioning the plurality of graphical symbol objects and icons with textual flags indicating an information node title derived from the associated sources; and
permitting a plurality of manual navigation approaches to select, highlight and retrieve and visually rank the plurality of information sources according to preferred-quantitative and qualitative metrics. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 17, 18, 19, 20)
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6. A method of navigating information, comprising the steps of:
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creating a plurality of three-dimensional views of a network of hyperlinked information nodes and links between nodes;
permitting the plurality of information views to be visually scaled and traversed in a three-dimensional representation and with changing user point-of-view perspective;
enabling user chosen information nodes and groups of nodes within the three-dimensional to be selected and highlighted by the user using any ergonomic means;
providing commands for the selected information nodes and associated collected information to be ranked and displayed as a textual and multimedia report when opened for viewing in a standard web browser;
providing commands for the selected information nodes to be opened as original source documents and media for viewing in a standard web browser. - View Dependent Claims (7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)
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15. An apparatus of providing information, comprising the steps of:
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creating a plurality of autonomous search agents to identify portions of a plurality of forms of information stored in a plurality of sources;
retrieving identified information from the plurality of sources;
representing the plurality of sources as a plurality of three-dimensional graphical symbol objects and associated links between sources;
visually accentuating the plurality of graphical symbol objects according to a plurality of information categories and states; and
visually captioning the plurality of graphical symbol objects and icons with textual flags indicating an information node title;
permitting a plurality of manual navigation approaches to select, highlight and retrieve the plurality of information sources;
effecting communication to the user of the evaluated search results using browser and email delivered reports. - View Dependent Claims (16)
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Specification