Systems and methods for persistent context-aware guides

• US 20080027707A1
• Filed: 07/28/2006
• Published: 01/31/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 07/28/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Xerox Corporation (Xerox Holdings Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Palo Alto Research Center, Inc. (Xerox Holdings Corp.)
• Inventors: Stefik, Barbara, Chi, Ed H., Hong, Lichan, Stefik, Mark J., Card, Stuart K.
• Granted Patent: US 10,460,327 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising

Abstract

Techniques are described that provide a reading pane for reading one or more content portions of a work and a guide pane that displays a structured overview of additional information from the corpus that is focused by an analysis of information from the currently-visible content portion of the work. The contents of the currently-visible content portion displayed within the reading page are used to derive dynamic representations of the user'"'"'s immediate interests. At the user'"'"'s request, a structured persistent context-aware guide is computed and displayed. The persistent context-aware guide provides a framework for accessing other parts of the corpus having the most-related information. The elements in the persistent context-aware guide are other content portions or other organizations such as sections, chapters, or articles in the corpus. The persistent context-aware guide may also incorporate additional closely-related information elements from outside the corpus including advertisements. Advertisements for information on the topics of immediate interest to the user can be incorporated within the structured, context-aware guide so that the reader can purchase them and review that information in the context of the current session. The guide pane and the reading pane support navigation controls so that the user can go to new or previous sub-portions of the content portion, new or previous content portions and/or new or previous persistent context-aware guides.

Claims

1. A method for creating and using persistent context-aware guides comprising the steps of:

displaying a content portion from the corpus;

determining information items from the content portion;

determining a set of guide elements for the corpus that correspond to the information items from the content portion; and

displaying the set of guide elements in a persistent interactive guide.

2. The method of claim 1, in which the corpus includes at least one of:

pages of a book, web pages, works in a digital library, works in an information feed.

3. The method of claim 1, where determining the content information items includes at least one of:

topic identification, and extracted entity identification.

4. The method of claim 1, where the set of guide elements from the corpus are elements from:

a table of contents, an index, a manually produced index, an automatically produced index, an ontology of extracted entities, and on ontology of topics.

5. The method of claim 1, where determining the corresponding guide from the corpus is based on a degree of interest.

6. The method of claim 1, where the degree of interest is based on at least one of:

term-matching, information scent, Generalized Lexical Semantic Analysis (GLSA), and Probabalistic Lexical Semantic Analysis (PLSA).

7. The method of claim 6, in which guide elements from the corpus items that are associated with the highest degree of interest to the content items are used to generate the persistent context-aware guide.

8. The method of claim 1, in which the content portion is displayed in a reading pane.

9. The method of claim 1, in which the set of guide elements from the corpus are derived from at least two sources.

10. The method of claim 1, in which the persistent context-aware guide is organized as at least one of:

a topic map, an index, a tree and lexicographically ordered sources.

11. The method of claim 8, in which the information items from the content portion are annotated to indicate referents of items from the corpus.

12. The method of claim 11, in which the annotations are indicated by a display characteristic.

13. The method of claim 12, in which the display characteristic is at least one of:

highlights, font effects, superscripts and subscripts.

14. The method of claim 11, where the annotations are selectable and operable to select associated guide elements for display.

15. The method of claim 11, in which reading pane interactions change the displayed persistent context-aware guide.

16. The method of claim 8, in which each pane contains a set of navigation controls.

17. The method of claim 16, in which the navigation controls include at least one of:

forward and back navigation controls.

18. The method of claim 8, in which the guide pane includes selectable guide elements indicative of relevant corpus items, which are outside the context of the reading pane.

19. The method of claim 18, in which the selectable guide elements are operable to adjust the scope of the guide.

20. The method of claim 1, in which at least one of the corpus items are protected by a rights management system.

21. The method of claim 1, in which access to at least one corpus item can be purchased by selecting the corpus item in the persistent context-aware guide.

22. The method of claim 20, in which displayed index elements associated with protected content portions are associated with a cost indicator.

23. The method of claim 21, in which the cost indicator is at least one of:

a token, a symbol, a word, and a display characteristic.

24. The method of claim 1, in which several pages are used to provide context for creating the guide.

25. The method of claim 24, in which the several pages are at least one of adjacent pages in a book, a set of recently-visited pages, a set of pages immediately linked to by the current page, a set of pages that are can be reached by a short path from the current page, a set of pages on the same web site as the current page.

26. The method of claim 1, in which the persistent context-aware guide indicates which pages in the guide elements were previously visited by the user.

27. The system of claim 20, in which the user can interact with the guide elements to purchase access to a single page of a work, a section of a work, a chapter, an entire work, and a collection of works.

28. A system for persistent context-aware guides comprising:

an input/output manager for retrieving content portions from a corpus of content portions;

a content analysis manager for determining dynamic user interest information in a currently displayed content portion;

a degree of interest manager for determining interesting corpus guide items based on the relatedness of the set of corpus guide elements and the determined dynamic user interest information; and

a persistent guide manager for determining a persistent context aware guide based on the content portion and the interesting corpus guide items.

29. A computer readable storage medium comprising computer readable program code embodied on the computer readable storage medium, the computer readable program code useable to program a computer for creating and using persistent context-aware guides comprising instructions for the steps of:

displaying a page of material from the corpus that the user can read;

determining information items from the contents of the page;

determining a set of guide elements for the corpus that correspond to the information items from the page; and

displaying the set of guide elements in a persistent interactive guide.