Collaborative workspace context information filtering

• US 20080133501A1
• Filed: 11/30/2006
• Published: 06/05/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 11/30/2006
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Nichols, David, Meek, Brian, Andersen, Hans
• Granted Patent: US 7,822,738 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/5
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/2425 Iterative querying; Query formulation based on the results of a preceding query
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9535 Search customisation based on user profiles and personalisation

Abstract

Architecture that provides real-time opportunistic access to data that is relevant and/or related user activities. Ways are disclosed to use information of a single workspace to structure automatic searches into a number of data stores in order to opportunistically extract relevant information therefrom. An email client can use workspace content to train a filter for identifying new messages deemed relevant or related to the content and topics of the workspace, a system can be provided to use the content of a single web site as contextual data for providing auto-generated links to other sites within the corporate enterprise, a collaborative application can natively understand the content being shared and then look for specific terms in the content which can be employed for generating a search query and returning relevant and/or related data, and combinations thereof are provided for automatically generating and searching data stores for relevant and related information.

Claims

1. A computer-implemented system that facilitates data management, comprising:

a data component for monitoring workspace information of a workspace; and

a search component for automatically searching a data store for data relevant to the workspace information.

2. The system of claim 1, wherein the relevant data searched for by the search component is obtained from a data store based on a current workspace activity.

3. The system of claim 1, further comprising a communications component that employs the workspace information to filter communications for relevant messages.

4. The system of claim 1, further comprising a classifier component for performing probabilistic and/or statistical-based analysis to prognose or infer an action that a user desires to be automatically performed.

5. The system of claim 4, wherein the classifier component trains a classification filter to filter communications for relevant and related messages, the classification filter trained using the workspace information.

6. The system of claim 1, wherein the search component automatically searches for a web site that serves web site data relevant to the workspace information.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the web site is an intranet web site that serves enterprise content related to a workspace activity.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein the workspace is shared as part of a real-time collaborative session and the workspace information includes session data which is employed by the search component to search for relevant data from remote data sources.

9. The system of claim 1, wherein the workspace is shared as part of a collaborative session, the data component monitors data presented to a session user and searches for relevant data based on the presented data.

10. The system of claim 1, wherein the data component monitors scheduling information as part of the workspace information and the search component searches for relevant information based on the scheduling information.

11. A computer-implemented method of managing data, comprising:

monitoring activity information of a workspace session;

automatically formulating a search query based in part on the activity information;

searching data sources for relevant data based on the search query; and

retrieving the relevant data to the workspace session.

12. The method of claim 11, further comprising automatically updating a classification filter based on the activity information.

13. The method of claim 11, further comprising searching and retrieving data related to content of the workspace session.

14. The method of claim 11, further comprising linking the workspace session to another workspace environment based on the activity information.

15. The method of claim 11, further comprising updating the activity information of the workspace session and automatically searching for another workspace environment based on the updated activity information.

16. The method of claim 11, further comprising redirecting relevant messages to the workspace session based on the activity information.

17. The method of claim 11, wherein the activity information includes shared content from which the search query is generated.

18. The method of claim 11, further comprising dynamically generating a new search query based on detection of new workspace data and searching the data sources based on the new search query to return new information to the workspace session.

19. The method of claim 11, further comprising:

accumulating session content of the workspace session;

updating a classifier-based message filter using the accumulated session content; and

tagging relevant messages subsequent to termination of the workspace session.

20. A computer-implemented system, comprising:

computer-implemented means for monitoring workspace content during user activity of a workspace;

computer-implemented means for formulating a search query based in part on the workspace content;

computer-implemented means for searching data sources for relevant data based on the search query; and

computer-implemented means for presenting the relevant data to a user of the workspace.