IN SITU SEARCH FOR ACTIVE NOTE TAKING

• US 20080250012A1
• Filed: 04/09/2007
• Published: 10/09/2008
• Est. Priority Date: 04/09/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Shilman, Michael, Hinckley, Kenneth P., Tan, Desney S., Zhao, Shengdong, Sarin, Raman K., Baudisch, Patrick M., Cutrell, Edward B.
• Granted Patent: US 7,693,842 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 707/5
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 18/28 Determining representative reference patterns, e.g. by averaging or distorting; Generating dictionaries
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 30/1914 Determining representative reference patterns, e.g. averaging or distorting patterns; Generating dictionaries, e.g. user dictionaries
• CPC Class Codes: G06V 30/387 using human interaction, e.g. selection of the best displayed recognition candidate

Abstract

A system and method that facilitates and effectuates in situ search for active note taking. The system and method includes receiving gestures from a stylus and a tablet associated with the system. Upon recognizing the gesture as belonging to a set of known and recognized gestures, the system creates an embeddable object, initiates a search with terms indicated by the gesture, associates the search results with the created object and inserts the object in close proximity with the terms that instigated the search.

Claims

1. A system implemented on a machine that effectuates in situ search for active note taking, comprising:

a component that receives a gesture from an input device, recognizes the gesture as belonging to a set of previously persisted gestures, associates a persistable and embeddable object with scribed terms identified by the gesture, and based on the gesture instantiates a search facility to return results using terms identified by the gesture, the results confederated with the embeddable object.

2. The system of claim 1, the gesture includes selecting a gesture mode with the system and circumscribing an area on a display.

3. The system of claim 2, the area circumscribed includes zero or more alphanumeric character.

4. The system of claim 1, the gesture includes depressing a button on a stylus and contemporaneously sweeping the stylus over previously scribed terms.

5. The system of claim 1, the terms include at least one alphanumeric character.

6. The system of claim 1, the persistable and embeddable object contiguously inserted and confederated with the terms identified by the gesture.

7. The system of claim 1, display of the results confederated with the embeddable object deferred to a time indicated by a user.

8. The system of claim 1, the embeddable object manipulable and subject to one or more of excision, insertion, selection, deletion, movement or storage to permanent media and association with persisted data.

9. The system of claim 1, the component employs handwriting analysis to automatically transform scribed cursive script into text.

10. The system of claim 1, the component utilizes a classifier to transform scribed content into one or more of a search vector, a set of words, a term, or a filter suitable for information retrieval.

11. The system of claim 1, the embeddable object associated with recognized query text and/or a number of results returned in response to the recognized query text.

12. The system of claim 1, the embeddable object associated with additional embeddable objects, the additional embeddable objects associated with disparate functions.

13. The system of claim 1, a digit situated over the embeddable object displayed on a tablet without touching the tablet causes the embeddable object to disclose information affiliated with the embeddable object.

14. The system of claim 1, the search facility returns results from a storage device associated with the system.

15. The system of claim 1, the search facility returns results from the Internet.

16. A machine implemented method for effectuating in situ search for active note taking, comprising:

receiving and recognizing a gesture from an input device;

generating an object and associating the object with search results from a search automatically initiated with scribed terms indicated by the gesture; and

inserting the object in close proximity to the scribed terms.

17. The method of claim 16, further includes displaying a directional stroke labeled with a short textual description that indicates a permissible gesture.

18. The method of claim 16, further includes animating confederated hints into or out of an interface control utilized for dismissal and retrieval of the confederated hints by a user.

19. The method of claim 16, further including employing a tracking menu, comprising one or more of:

a scroll ring that receives pseudo-circular motion from the input device and translates the motion into vertical or horizontal scrolling in a focus application of a system manager window;

a capture tool that allows a user to circumscribe an area of a display;

a close box that dismisses the tracking menu;

a move handle for dragging the tracking menu to a new position, the tracking menu provides cross application functionality between disparate applications that utilize dissimilar input modalities.

20. A system that facilitates in situ search for active note taking, comprising:

means for receiving and recognizing a gesture from an input means;

means for creating an object and associating the object with search results from a search automatically initiated with scribed terms indicated by the gesture as parameters; and

means for inserting the object in close proximity to the scribed terms on the input means.